You will rarely be left without things to do in this city, which has plenty of inspiration from those who have gone before, writes Emma Cullinan
TOURS OF Oxford involve intellectual name-dropping on a historic scale. There are connections with this pretty city from the worlds of science to mathematics, literature and film, so you get a sense of illustrious people’s lives when you visit the places where they studied and taught or the pubs in which they discussed works in progress with similarly significant mates.
Yet Oxford looks like any provincial town when you arrive in its station after an easy hour from London’s Paddington – this is out where the brand-name shops fear to trade and instead is a neighbourhood of nondescript independent stores. But start walking the short distance to the city centre and you will be guided by Oxford’s lofty “dreaming spires” which poet Matthew Arnold referred to in a poem: it’s a depiction that the city has embraced.
And once in the city centre you are in a world where medieval mixes with modern, where the university buildings are knitted into the fabric of a city that includes the Cornmarket pedestrianised area, which is full of chain shops. To get a feel for the original city, you need to look up at the facades above the plastic signage and on over to those spires.
The dreamy peaks point out of real Gothic buildings – the oldest colleges, Balliol and Merton, date to the late 13th century – as well as edifices built in the same style later on. Gothic’s spiky form, with its tapered towers; thin, perpendicular, triangle-topped windows and angled dormers is often a dark, sharp architecture; associated with blackened exteriors and gloomy interiors, but here the local yellow Cotswold limestone has rendered this a warm, friendly incarnation. The carvings and contours of buildings are starkly visible, and not half-hidden in shadows, yet the structures retain a sense of drama and history and that is heightened by how they relate to the town.
ONE OXFORD resident told me to look out for the way in which the university walls address the city streets, with periodic openings – so that as you walk, or drive, through the centre you get flashes of green where the walls break and college quadrangles are suddenly revealed.
There are small oak doors (with handles on the inside to keep out those not in the academic club) through which people appear from nowhere or abruptly disappear off pavements, away from town and into gown life, like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, or the children in the Narnia stories, leaving the everyday world for a magical and mysterious land.
The authors of those books, Lewis Carroll and CS Lewis, have links with Oxford. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a maths professor who wrote the books for the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church: Alice, Edith and Lorina.
The stories began on boating trips on the Thames (or Isis, as the river is known here) and took in parts of the city including the buildings and gardens of Christ Church college (whose main hall and stairs was the setting in a Harry Potter film where Harry sees his parents in a long mirror).
CS Lewis, a classics, philosophy and English student who became a Fellow of Magdalen college, was inspired to write the Narnia stories when a group of evacuees came to live in his Oxford home and one child asked him what was behind an old wardrobe. The many authors connected with Oxford (including John Donne, TS Eliot, TE Lawrence, C Day Lewis, John Galsworthy, Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch and Oscar Wilde, to name a sprinkling) include more creators of imaginary worlds such as Kenneth Grahame ( Wind in the Willows), Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materialstrilogy of fantasy novels, and JRR Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English, who wrote Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien and his friend CS Lewis were in the literary group known as the Inklings who met in the Eagle and Child pub, on Magdalen Street, locally nicknamed the Bird and Baby, where they would read their work to each other.
In this town, many scholars were brilliant at more than one thing; where Lewis Carroll taught maths and wrote literature, so Christopher Wren taught science and designed the Sheldonian Theatre (built between 1664 and 1669) on Broad Street near the Bodleian Library.
This library, like Trinity College Dublin, gets a copy of every book published and has underground tunnels to accommodate all eight million of them, on 177km of shelving. Alan Bennett, who went to nearby Exeter College, recently donated his work to the library.
You can get an aerial view of the city from the Sheldonian cupola and the nearby Church of St Mary the Virgin, which was built in 1280 and is thought to be the oldest university building in the world. The church is a short walk from the Sheldonian across Radcliffe Square past the Radcliffe Camera, the first circular library in Britain, built in 1749 to a design by James Gibbs.
Most of the colleges are open to the public in the afternoons (some all day) and many of them have free entry, although the big names charge – these include Christ Church, Balliol, Magdalen. Yet other less well- known colleges have their gems: Harris Manchester College, in Mansfield Road, for instance, has a chapel with pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones (also in Christ Church).
Countless films and television programmes were filmed in the colleges, as well as in the Ashmolean museum, the old prison (now a Malmaison hotel and a castle you can visit), and in the city, including Inspector Morse, Brideshead Revisted, Wilde, Shadowlands, Porridgeand the Harry Pottermovies.
THE GREAT thing about Oxford is its size and the fact that there is so much packed into a small space. You will never be short of a museum or college to visit, and there are university parks, benches on streets and ledges on buildings, such as the Sheldonian where you can sit, watch and listen.
I got random snapshots while eating chips here, hearing one lecturer say to another: “The thing about Danes is that they exercise.” Students: “That’s what makes exams bearable” (sorry, I didn’t catch the answer). And a woman to a man: “Do you have your eye on any woman? Or man even?”
The city’s compact size means that you can easily get in the midst of greenery. You can walk down the High Street to the river to go punting, or walk along the Thames (to London if you have the energy) or the canal (to Coventry) or visit the Botanical Gardens.
You will rarely be left without things to do in this city, but it also has its quiet spaces and convivial coffee spots in which to do some creative work of your own, in a beautiful setting with plenty of inspiration from those who have gone before.
Where to stay, where to eat and where to go
Five places to stay
1. Malmaison. 3 Oxford Castle, New Road, 00-44-1865-268400, malmaison.com. A former prison where you can stay in cells: three knocked into a double bedroom (whereas one cell used to accommodate three people). There is also a choice of new, airy, glassy rooms overlooking the former exercise courtyard, now a lawn. Amazing experience sleeping in a cell, and the breakfast and restaurant food is excellent. Ask to see the unconverted cell where Porridge was filmed. Rooms from £170 (€200).
2. Old Parsonage. 1 Banbury Road, 00-44-1865-310210, oldparsonage-hotel.co.uk. Former home of Oscar Wilde, this boutique hotel is in a building that dates to 1660. It is five minutes from the city centre, beside St Giles church. Rooms from £214 (€253).
3. Park House. 7 St Bernard’s Road, 00-44-1865-310824. Victorian house offering BB just to the north of the city centre. Doubles from £60 (€70).
4. Oxfordrooms.co.uk. Website on which you can book rooms in an Oxford college such as St Benet’s Hall and Jesus College. Availability is mainly during Christmas, Easter and summer but some have rooms all year round. Rooms from £30 (€35).
5. Isis Guest House. 45-53 Iffley Road, 00-44-1865-613700, isisguesthouse.com. Summer accommodation run by St Edmund Hall college. Doubles from £74 (€87).
5 places to eat
1. Café Coco. Cowley Road, 00-44-1865-200232, cafe-coco.co.uk. Restaurant with friendly atmosphere serving pizza, pasta, fish, salads in the quirky, multicultural Cowley Road area, with browseable shops, to the east of the city, sometimes known as Cowleyfornia.
2. Chiang Mai Kitchen. 130a High Street, 00-44-1865-202233, chiangmaikitchen.co.uk. Busy Thai restaurant with pleasant staff in a beautiful setting – a 17th-century house – tucked away in city centre.
3. Edamamé. 15 Holywell Street, 00-44-1865-246916, edamame.freeserve.co.uk. Small sittingroom-sized Japanese restaurant where the size and low prices means they need high turnover so don’t expect to stay for long and you may share your table. All worth it for delicious, healthy food.
4. Jamie’s Italian. 24-26 George Street, 00-44-1865-838383, jamiesitalian.com. A Jamie Oliver restaurant nodding to the Italian cooking he first learned as a chef at the River Café. Fresh pasta means just that: it is made on the premises. The restaurant is in a former pub with two casual dining rooms upstairs and a funky room with graffitied brick walls downstairs.
5. Quod Brasserie. 92-94 High Street, 00-44-1865-202505, quod.co.uk. Big, airy brasserie in a former banking hall in the city centre, with outdoor terrace. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a menu of pizza, pasta, chicken, fish and lamb, beef and pork: the latter, four-legged creatures, coming from the owners’ Oxfordshire farm.
5 places to go
1. Natural History Museum. Parks Road, 00-44-1865-272950, oum.ox.ac.uk. Designed in 1855 by Irish architects Deane and Woodward, who also created Trinity College Museum in Dublin. Fabulous cathedral-like structure with gorgeous iron pillars. Includes dinosaur skeletons, a dodo and stuffed animals with signs on them saying “Please touch”. Entry is free.
2. Pitt Rivers Museum. Parks Road, 00-44-1865-270927, prm.ox.ac.uk. To the rear of the Natural History Museum. Pieces from the collections of Rivers who was influential in the areas of archaeology and anthropology. Includes a display of human heads, or tsantsas, from the Upper Amazon, that were boiled down to about the size of tennis balls. These were collected between 1871 and 1936, and the practice of cooking your enemies thus only stopped in the 1960s. Fascinating with a strong “ew” factor. Entry is free.
3. Botanic Garden. High Street, 00-44-1865-286690, botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk. Another legacy of academic research which was founded in 1621. It is in a lovely setting beside the River Cherwell. An unpretentious, practical place, with all of its 7,000 different types of plants graded, practically, by botanical type rather than being displayed for show, but which is beautiful despite, or because, of that. Entry £3.50 (€4.10), free to children in full-time education accompanied by adult.
4. Ashmoleum Museum. Beaumont Street, 00-44-1865-278000, ashmoleun.org. The world’s first public museum which has a new extension by American architect Rick Mather woven into its fabric. Exhibits range from artifacts from ancient Rome and Greece to modern paintings. Lovely rooftop restaurant. Free entry.
5. Waterperry Gardens. Nr Wheatley, Oxfordshire, 00-44-1844-339254, waterperrygardens.co.uk. Plant nursery a few miles out of Oxford with gardens to amble about in, planted with trees, shrubs and flowers in classical borders, modern planting schemes, secret corners and long vistas. Plenty of events throughout the year. Home-made teas complete the idyllic experience.
Hot spot
O2 Academy. 190 Cowley Road, 00-44-1865-813500, o2academyoxford.co.uk. A cool gig venue which, when it was called the Zodiac, launched bands such as Radiohead (from these parts and who can still be seen around town), Supergrass and Ride.
Shop spot
The Cornmarket area for standard chain stores, High Street for smarter clothes shops such as Hobbs and, for quirky independent shops, go to Little Clarendon Street, Turl Street, the Golden Cross and Gloucester Green (where there are markets on Wednesdays and Thursdays). Boswells is a relaxed family-owned department store on Broad Street, with offerings ranging from cheap crockery by the front door to gorgeous cosmetics, such as Dr Hauschka and Beauty Without Cruelty in an unpretentious setting, as well as university-branded clothes. The Oxfam shop nearby is the first of its kind. Blackwell’s at 53 Broad Street has part of its shop beneath the Trinity College quad.