Tom Tower

Tom Tower is a ringer tower in Oxford, England, named for its chime, Great Tom.

It is over Tom Gate, on St Aldates, the fundamental passageway of Christ Church, Oxford, which leads into Tom Quad.

This square pinnacle with an octagonal light and facetted ogee arch was composed by Christopher Wren and constructed 1681– 82.

The quality of Oxford design custom and Christ Church's association with its originator, Henry VIII, persuaded the choice to finish the gatehouse structure, left incomplete via Cardinal Wolsey at the date of his tumble from control in 1529, and which had stayed roofless since.

Wren put forth a defense for working in a Late Gothic style – that it "should be Gothick to concur with the Founders worke" – a style that had not been found in a noticeable working for a hundred and fifty years, influencing Tom To tower a desolate antecedent of the Gothic Revival that got in progress in the mid-eighteenth century.