lies beside a river. Scott's building's main elevation, like the one Bury initially designed for Otago, is symmetrical with its tower and entrance at the centre. But the Otago building, as Anscombe completed it, gains something, because its disproportionately long southward reach exceeds one's expectation. Also, its apparently pragmatic extrapolation supports the impression it is a medieval building, extended over centuries without undue deference to an original plan. The Otago building's tower is also something like Scott's for Glasgow, or his St Pancras Station tower in London. They have their origins in Flemish and Netherlandish civic buildings of the late Middle Ages but in this revived, Victorian form are part of a family which includes A.W. N. Pugin's for Scarisbrick Hall and the tower housing Big Ben on the Palace of Westminster. For a long time the Otago tower was blind but in the 1930s Thomas Sidey, a local politician and a member of the university council, paid for a clock to be installed. In the 1950s the Ministry of Works recommended demolishing the building as an earthquake risk. Instead the university council strengthened it, with visible tie-rods, in the early 1960s. The original tall chimney stacks were first simplified and eventually removed. The chamber behind the north gable which used to house the library has accommodated the university council since 1965. The caretaker's house, visibly incorporated into the rear of the northernmost compartment externally, is now internally part of the administrative suite. Also in the 1960s part of the inner quadrangle wall, the east elevation, was elaborately demolished and rebuilt a short distance further eastward, blurring some original features. The tower's stone pinnacles were replaced with stainless steel caps, rendered in cement, in the same decade. The steeply raked upper and lower Oliver lecture theatres were stripped out in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the exterior and some of the principal interior spaces, such as the tiled entrance and its handsome staircase, are much as they were when they were built. Comparable buildings The old Canterbury College’s clock tower building in Christchurch, now part of the Christchurch Arts Centre, is a directly comparable, if lesser structure in New Zealand. It was designed by Benjamin Mountfort, opened in 1877 and became part of a larger, Gothic Revival complex. The Hunter Building at Victoria University of Wellington is a more distant parallel. It was opened in 1904, designed by Penty & Blake and