Never mind the seats, listen to the acoustics

Buttocks today know nothing about real discomfort, least of all in contemporary Oxford. Look, these benches are covered in foam-filled cushioning. We never had upholstery in my day in the Sheldonian. We sat on hard, shiny, post-puritan boards polished by 400 years of every kind of buttock. And remember, the buttocks that had originally slid across these boards had been flogged so frequently they could stand up to anything, even sitting down.

It's a little misleading to call the Sheldonian Theatre a theatre. It was one of Christopher Wren's first projects and never designed for plays but for university ceremonies such as degree giving and matriculation.

Ceremonies had taken place in church but they came to feature music and a satirical speech from a renaissance sketchwriter-cum-gossip columnist called Terrae Filius. You couldn't behave like that on hallowed ground, not in those days. So Gilbert Sheldon asked Christopher Wren for a secular building to accommodate the revels.

But a problem has developed over the past 500 years: we're all so much bigger than we were (I am, if you're not), and the benches are no more than a foot deep. It wouldn't worry me, but it might irritate the person in front, to sit through an evening of Baroque music, my foot in their lap.

But even if the seating arrangements are a bit neo-Classical some of us prefer them to Haut Gaumont. It's one of Britain's most glorious auditoria for early English music, and the best acoustics you could hope for (particularly when it's empty). And its current administrator, chairman Jeffrey Hackney, has rather brilliantly added almost invisible seatbacks to many of the seats. There may be further developments in the next 500 years, if the criticism continues.