Sheldonian Theatre

Stand still on Broad Street for a moment and look up. A row of huge stone heads watches you from the top of stone pillars. Some are bearded. Some frown. One or two seem almost amused. Behind them rises a curved building of pale honey-coloured stone, topped by a small eight-sided cupola. This is the Sheldonian Theatre. It is the ceremonial heart of the University of Oxford, and it was the first major building by a young man who would later change the skyline of London.

That young man was Christopher Wren. When he took this commission in the 1660s, he was not yet known as an architect at all. He was a scientist, a professor of astronomy here in Oxford, and a member of the circle of thinkers who soon formed the Royal Society. Saint Paul's Cathedral still lay decades in his future. Here, on this patch of ground, Wren was teaching himself to build. The theatre went up during the 1660s and opened in 1669.

The money came from Gilbert Sheldon, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a former head of an Oxford college. The building carries his name. Sheldon had a very practical reason for paying. Before the theatre existed, the university held its great ceremonies inside the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, just a short walk south of here. Those events could be noisy and rowdy, and many people felt a church was the wrong place for them. A separate secular hall solved the problem.

Wren looked to ancient Rome for his model. The shape of the building follows the Theatre of Marcellus, an open-air Roman theatre that Wren knew from printed architectural books. Look at the plan as you walk around it. The front facing the Bodleian Library is straight and formal. The back, facing Broad Street, curves like the seating of a Roman amphitheatre. In Rome, the audience sat under the open sky. In Oxford's weather, Wren needed a roof.

That roof became his first great puzzle. The hall is wide, and Wren wanted no columns inside to block the view. Timber beams long enough to cross the whole space in one piece were not available. So Wren designed a system of interlocking timber trusses, drawing on mathematical ideas about how short beams can support each other across a wide span. It was an engineering experiment, and people at the time admired it as a marvel. Without that roof, the open hall below simply could not exist.

Now step inside, if the building is open on your visit. Your eyes will go straight up. The flat ceiling is covered with a vast painting by Robert Streater, who served as painter to King Charles the Second. It is made of many separate canvas panels fitted together. Wren and Streater used a clever trick here. The painting shows the sky as if the roof were open, with a great painted canvas awning pulled back on gilded ropes, just as a Roman theatre might have been shaded from the sun.

The scene in that painted sky is an allegory, a story told through symbolic figures. Truth descends from the heavens toward the Arts and Sciences, who gather to greet her. At the edges, figures representing Ignorance, Envy and Hatred are pushed out and tumble away. For a university, the message is easy to read. Learning rises. Ignorance falls. Take a moment to find the falling figures near the edge. Many visitors look only at the bright centre and miss them.

Below the ceiling, the hall itself is made mostly of wood. Tiers of benches curve around the room. Wooden columns are painted to look like marble, a common trick of the period. Notice how close everyone sits. The room was designed so that a large crowd could see and hear one central ceremony. Even today, a person speaking from the floor can be heard clearly across the hall without much effort. That quality is one reason the space still works so well for music.

And music has a long story here. In 1733, George Frideric Handel came to Oxford and performed in this theatre. Over the centuries, the hall has hosted countless concerts, from orchestras to choirs to solo recitals. But its main purpose has never changed. Students come here to be formally admitted to the university, and later to receive their degrees. Much of the ceremony is still spoken in Latin. Families in their best clothes fill the benches, and graduates in dark gowns shuffle forward to be called by name.

The most grand of these events is called Encaenia, a ceremony held each summer. During Encaenia, the university gives honorary degrees to distinguished guests, and speeches in Latin praise benefactors of the university. Senior figures process through the streets in colourful academic robes. If you happen to be in Oxford on that day, the streets around this building fill with a slow parade of scarlet and black. It is one of the few moments when the theatre's original function is visible to every passer-by.

Here is a detail most people do not know. For a time, this building also served as a printing house. The university's press worked inside the theatre in its early years, before it moved into the Clarendon Building right next door. That neighbour, with its tall columns, was built partly with money from the press itself. So the history of Oxford University Press, one of the oldest publishers in the world, begins in part within these walls.

Now return to those heads on the pillars outside. People call them the Emperors, but nobody is certain who they were meant to show. They may be Roman emperors. They may be ancient philosophers. They may simply be decorative figures. The stone suffers badly in Oxford's damp air, so the heads have been replaced more than once. The faces you see today are modern carvings, made in the twentieth century to replace badly eroded earlier versions. Each one has its own expression, so take a minute to compare them.

If the cupola is open, the climb is worth it. From the small windows at the top, you look out across the rooftops of central Oxford. You can see college towers, spires, and the great dome of the Radcliffe Camera close by. It is one of the best ways to understand how tightly the old university buildings press together. Wren's roof is beneath your feet as you stand there. The view gives you a quiet sense of how the city grew around its places of learning.

As you leave, pause one more time at the curved wall on Broad Street. Listen to the bicycles ticking past and the voices of students crossing toward the Bodleian. Then look again at the Emperors, weathered and watchful. More than three centuries ago, a young astronomer stood near here and planned his first building. Every summer, new graduates still walk out of those doors into this same street, blinking in the light, with a fresh degree in their hands.