Grade-I listed Christ Church is a monument to an eccentric Victorian age, writes CHRIS KOENIG

Oxford Cathedral, which doubles up as the college chapel for Christ Church, must be a hot contender for the city's quirkiest place. Not only does it still operate according to a different time to everyone else (five minutes behind) thanks to a 19th-century refusal to conform to a universal system, but it now emerges that the Grade-I listed building is not subject to any planning regulations either.

The July issue of The Victorian, the magazine of the Victorian Society, states: "this is the alarming situation we are faced with at Christ Church Cathedral, where a legislative loophole has allowed the cathedral authority to remain exempt from both the secular and ecclesiastical listed building regulations for many years".

The society's ire was aroused after it got wind of the Dean and Chapter's plans to remove some finely-carved pews by Sir Gilbert Scott, but it is easy to see why it takes such a keen interest in the Cathedral and indeed in Oxford generally.

Among the Victorian features in the cathedral are a set of Pre-Raphaelite windows by Edward Burne-Jones, one of which is dedicated to Edith, sister of Alice Liddell, the real life Alice in Wonderland.

Succeeding generations inherit each other's buildings, much as the guests at the Mad Hatter's tea party inherited each other's dirty crockery as they moved round the table, but the 19th-century overlay on 16th-century architecture at Christ Church and its cathedral typifies Oxford's atmosphere which seems to me to be largely Victorian in a dreamy sort of way.

Alice herself, of course, was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry George Liddell. He was co-author of the Liddell and Scott Greek Dictionary, some of the proceeds of which paid for the so-called Lexicon Staircase at the college.

On July 4, 1862 , aged ten, she and her two sisters Lorina, 12, and Edith, eight boarded a boat beneath Folly Bridge, hired from Salters, with the mild-mannered mathematics don Lewis Carroll (aka the Rev Charles Dodgson) and two other clergymen for a trip down the river to Godstow.

That Golden Afternoon, as Dodgson recorded it in his diary, was the occasion that the girls first heard the stories of Alice which, as she was to recall in later life, "lived and died like summer gnats". Edith, he also reorded, interrupted his story-telling "not more than once a minute".

But to return to Christ Church. Tom Tower, designed by Wren, contains what for decades was the largest bell in Britain. It was modelled on the bell originally removed from Osney Abbey (Oxford's Cathedral 1542-1546) and each night rings out an unheeded curfew 101 times to call the students home at 9.05pm, not nine o'clock.

In this centenary year of that admirer of Victorian Oxford, John Betjeman, I could not help thinking of his book Summoned by Bells as I cycled past the tower the other evening. What would he say about moving pews?