Cowley Road, Oxford

The last, for the moment, of my selection of Oxford's less well known buildings is the Elm Tree pub in East Oxford's Cowley Road. For me, this is an example of the way, when walking around a city, a previously unnoticed building can suddenly catch the eye. I don't know anything about this building. Most of its features – the low-sweeping roof, fancy dormer window, curved canopy above the door, the long band of stone-framed windows, the tall chimneys, and so on – testify to the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late-19th century. The lettering above the door is pretty self-consciously crafty too – reminiscent in fact of the kind of letter forms often seen on the covers of Victorian children's books, the ancestors of The Dangerous Book for Boys. Perhaps someone out there knows the history of this pub, the penultimate stop before the Ultimate Picture Palace next door.

Bartlemas, Oxford

Tucked away up a lane (signposted ‘Private’) just a few hundred yards away from Cowley Road in East Oxford, Bartlemas is the remains of a hospital founded by Henry I, who ruled England from 1100 to 1135. This little building is the chapel, which, going by the windows, looks 14th century and so must be a replacement of an earlier original. Just to the north is a long stone range, part of the hospital’s domestic buildings.

When the hospital was built, and for centuries afterwards, this would have been an isolated enclave, far away from the city of Oxford, a place of quiet and seclusion where a few old or infirm inmates could live out their years in peace. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Oxford grew eastwards in ribbons of houses, shops, and factories, the new buildings surrounding and sometimes engulfing what was already there. What’s remarkable is that Bartlemas still keeps its air of quietude, even though it’s now so near to the bustle of the Cowley Road. A haunt of ancient peace.