Tom Quad

After some 150 years, the gatehouse was completed in 1681–1682 with Tom Tower, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, when John Fell was Dean.

Parts of the quad are still lived in by undergraduates, including the staircase above the Porter's lodge, known as "Bachelors' Row", to the left of the quadrangle when entered via Tom Gate.

[8] Lady Gwendolyn Cecil, in the biography of her father (the last Victorian Prime Minister Lord Salisbury), recounts how as a student in the 1840s, he rescued his bookish friends from being dunked in the fountains, by infiltrating the hearties and tipping off his friends about the time of the planned raid, and arranging with them a counter-ambush: Late that night the intended victim sat in full view of his window, apparently solitary and absorbed in a book.

But when his opponents approached the room, flushed with wine and encouraged by the certainty of victory by the unsported oak before them and by the silence that reigned around, they were suddenly startled by a yell from the dark abyss of the staircase above and at the same moment overborne by a tumultuously rushing descent.

The next day their opponents were the laughing-stock of the college, and for some time to come a man at Christ Church might read as much and drink as little as he pleased with complete impunity'.