Exeter College Library: same but surprisingly different

The first eyebrow-raiser at Exeter College’s refurbished library, as you stand in front of a large oak entrance door with quatrefoil light in a gothic portal of freshly-hewn Clipsham stone, is that it slides effortlessly open to greet you. By the time you’ve left, it won’t have been the only surprise. 

The college, founded in 1314, is the fourth oldest in Oxford, predating the adjacent Bodleian Library’s Convocation Hall by around 200 years. Its front quadrangle, despite the 15th century Palmer’s Tower and 16th century Hall, is a mainly 17th century iteration, closed on its north side in 1859 by George Gilbert Scott, whose Decorated Gothic chapel pays homage to Paris’ famed Sainte Chapelle. But richly detailed and drenched in stained glass, the college may well have overrun on its budget; by the time Scott was commissioned for the library facing the Fellows’ Garden to the east, the Gothic style was decidedly more parsimonious. Creating an L-shape, its annex, a lower, narrow stone block facing the Rector’s Garden, was more restrained still. As its collection grew, the 1950s saw its Gothic lights unceremoniously cleaved by an incongruous mezzanine housing light-starved stacks below and unsuitable reading rooms above.

Nex– Architecture’s charge, from 2018, was not only to bring Scott’s library into the 21st century in terms of environmental performance, but to create additional study space and improve the building’s circulation and accessibility for future generations of students. Due to site sensitivity, the firm has made almost no change to the building exterior, save for the automated Gothic entrance door and an access lift overrun, visible only from the Rector’s house. Inside, the biggest moves have been saved for the annex, where a new mezzanine pulls away from the old facade to free the windows and create a double-height space. It also burrows into the sliver of space between it and the Bodleian’s west wall to use every inch of this tight site, which yields the restored building’s other big ‘surprise’ moment.

With the new entrance situated at the L’s intersection, there a striking intimacy as you step into the building that would not have been experienced when walking into the old entrance at its west end. What would have been a ‘blind’ left turn into the annex from the main library now forms a point of clear orientation; ahead, a few steps lead down to its newly created reading room, and immediately to the left is the lofty Gilbert Scott library. Nex– associate Joe Dent speaks of how dark the original library felt, with old bookcases blocking light from the windows. These have been removed to install generous, beautifully detailed leather-topped oak desks and low-level built-in bookshelves facing the central aisle; the joinery’s curved edges and slim, cylindrical light bars giving desks a strong contemporary feel despite the Dickensian context.

Dent draws attention to customised bottom-up solar blinds for the Gothic tracery but, working alongside Donald Insall Associates, most interventions are low-key but impactful – such as insulation of the existing roof and fitting underfloor heating and new low-energy radiators, making the building ready for future installation of a ground-source heat pump array under the Fellows’ Garden. The exception is the new lift connecting the building’s four levels. With doors facing both the Scott library and the annex, the cladding of its shaft in relief diamond-motif cast iron panels seems heavy-handed at first, but Dent earnestly argues that the choice, having ‘bold materiality and presence, is, in its finish, sympathetic to the age of the building’. The client must have been convinced for Nex– successfully argued against the use of ‘go-to’ lead to the extent that the lift overrun, hung with the same sharp, cast-iron panels, now pops up to frame a small corner turret, just for the Rector. 

Inside, the panels are counterpointed by the fine joinery of one of the new staircases, sat below one of four deep, circular rooflights, set with dichroic glass fins, which, says Dent, pick up on delicate examples of stained glass in the building – some by Burne-Jones. All of them, even that above a new accessible toilet, allow Bodleian gargoyles to stare down inquisitively on their closest neighbour. 

Engineered by Webb Yates, the 14m- long annex upper reading space is itself formed of a Kerto CLT timber C-section beam. Dent explains that the solid ‘balustrade’ acts as its web, and the desk run as its flange. Its use brings new drama to a previously cramped space and means distracted students can be eyeballed by past benefactors hanging high on the stone wall opposite. The demand for hush is served by the beam’s cladding in fabric acoustic insulation set behind a fine grille of vertical oak slats that runs down and seamlessly round its length to the soffit. 

While the lower level is dominated by more of Nex–’s luxurious reading desks, the real treat lies behind the bookstack wall, where at the swipe of an access card two bookcases magically pivot and pop open to provide a much-needed, tiny, rooflit online meeting pod and critical storage space for staff – all eked out from the centuries-old void between the Bodleian’s adjacent buttresses. It’s a playful moment of Harry Potter fantasy with which former Exonian Philip Pullman might seriously resonate; a conceit in the library’s smart yet scholarly reinvention.