Howard Colvin (1919–2007) was elected a Fellow of St John’s in 1947 and served as the College’s medieval history tutor for four decades. A graduate of University College London, Colvin was the first St John’s Fellow not to have been educated at Oxford. Nonetheless, he quickly ‘found the college [to be] a highly congenial society […] and an excellent place for the pursuit of scholarship, whether medieval or architectural’, and it was here at St John’s that Colvin produced – and repeatedly revised – the landmark works that established him as the doyen of English architectural history.

Beyond his scholarly endeavours, the College owes Colvin an enormous debt for keeping a discerning eye on its architectural fabric. In the 1950s, Colvin played a decisive role in commissioning the Architects’ Co-Partnership to build the Beehive – the first modernist addition to an Oxford college. Later in his life, Colvin also personally designed an addition to the Senior Common Room. As Fellow Librarian, Colvin was instrumental in converting the residential rooms beneath the Old Library into a much-needed new reading room (known as the Paddy Room, since converted to tutorial rooms in 2024). He also published a significant study of the architecture of Canterbury Quad. It is fitting that a plaque in Colvin’s memory now stands in that most celebrated of Oxford quadrangles.