The earliest periods of the development of a university chemistry school at Oxford are not easily unravelled from the simultaneous development of schools in physics and biochemistry. Chemistry was seen to be a truly separate discipline with the building of its own laboratory as an appendix to the Science Museum which opened in 1860. The laboratory stood and still stands as a remarkable small octagonal structure beside the museum, built in Victorian Gothic style deliberately designed on the Abbot's kitchen at Glastonbury. The building, one of the first purpose built chemical laboratories anywhere, is still called the Abbot's Kitchen. The laboratory was extended, still in Gothic style, in 1878 and this extension now houses the ICL undegraduate teaching laboratory.

The Oxford Museum. Architects: Benjamin Woodward and T. N. Deane. 1858. Woodcut by O. Jewitt from Eastlake, facing p. 283 - source

University Museum, Oxford: proposed sketch. Wood engraving by W.E. Hodgkin, 1855, after B. Sly, after Deane and Woodward. - source

Lithograph of the University Museum, circa 1880, with the Clarendon Laboratory in the background. 
The southern boundary of the University after the construction of the Inorganic Chemistry extension in 1876 and prior to the construction of the Radcliffe Science Library in 1901.

Exterior of Abbot's Kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury, Somerset, England - source