Keble College

Keble College opened its doors to just thirty students in 1870, and the Chapel was opened on St Mark’s Day 1876. The architect was William Butterfield, whose striking polychromatic brickwork, ‘the most approved “holy zebra” style’ in the eyes of its critics, served as a defiant assertion of a distinctively high church position. If it was the intention of the College’s founders to create a high church seminary, its first Warden, Edward Talbot, had other ideas, encouraging the teaching of science, and showing sympathy to the theory of evolution.