Merton College Chapel

The Merton College Chapel is defined by a massive, high-towered choir that abruptly stops at the transepts, leaving the nave intended for the building unfinished for over seven hundred years. Walter de Merton founded the college in twelve sixty-four, but the choir took nearly a century to complete, finished in thirteen ninety-four. During the English Civil War, King Charles the First held court in Oxford, and he used the chapel as his royal place of worship while the nave remained a hollow dream.