I bet that the architect read Coleridge.
That aqua copper bit, the tower roof, resembles the tents one sees painted on the page of early Turkic (Mongol Turk) texts.
Coleridge's Kubla Kahn was published in 1816.
The University Arms Hotel, on Parker's Piece, was built in 1834, the year Samuel Taylor Coleridge died.
Just one more Coleridge inspired architectural jot, the copper cap of the Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge.
The cap takes the form of a Mongul warrior's helmet.
[Aside:]
This photo also contains a Cambridge curiosity, a gift of the city's Nightclimbers.
Look carefully at the tail fin of the whale weather vane. That's a red Santa's cap.
The Nightclimbers delight in scaling impossible heights - at night, of course - and leaving something behind.
In one story of their escapades, a Nightclimber's cap appeared on one of the ornate towers of King's College Chapel. At great expense, the College erected scaffolding to reach it. The night before the scaffolding reached the top of the tower, the cap was removed ... to a facing tower.
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