The Queen’s College must be one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere on the bend of Oxford’s High Street, serenely classical.

But the process of its design is curiously opaque.  Hawksmoor made lots of drawings for it while he was working on Blenheim, but they were too ambitious.  Construction of the front quadrangle was done by William Townesend, the head of a family of masons responsible for many of the buildings in Oxford at the time, but it is assumed that his work was either overseen or the original plans were drawn up by George Clarke, a ubiquitous and knowledgeable (and very worldly) Oxford don, who gave his collection of architectural drawings to Worcester:-