Oxford

Why go

The oldest university in the English-speaking world — teaching recorded here since 1096. Thirty-nine self-governing colleges — each a walled quadrangle with its own hall, chapel and rules. Libraries as monuments — the Bodleian has held a copy of every British book since 1610. A river city — punts, meadows and towpaths that explain why the colleges were built where they were.

The character

Oxford is not a university with a town around it but a federation of colleges that happens to share a city. Each college owns its buildings, admits its own students, employs its own tutors and keeps its own silver, and the university exists above them to set exams and award degrees. That structure, unchanged in essentials since the thirteenth century, is why the place looks the way it does: high walls, one gate, a porter, and a green quadrangle nobody outside may cross without permission.

The consequence is a city built around interiors that most visitors never enter. What is visible from the street — Hawksmoor towers, the Radcliffe Camera, the Bridge of Sighs — is the outward face of institutions whose actual life happens in tutorials of two students and one tutor. Term brings gowns, bicycles and a specific kind of hurry; vacations empty it entirely. And because the colleges were endowed with land, Oxford still has meadows inside the ring road: cattle graze within ten minutes' walk of the Bodleian, which is the single most English thing about it.

Places of character

Bodleian Library and Duke Humfrey's Reading Room — a legal deposit library since 1610; the medieval reading room is on the tour. Christ Church Meadow at dusk — the walk that explains the geography, with cattle and the two rivers. Radcliffe Camera — the 1749 rotunda, best seen from the tower of St Mary's, which is open and cheap. New College cloisters and the city wall — the college is obliged by its 1379 charter to maintain the wall it was built against. Pitt Rivers Museum — a Victorian anthropology collection arranged by type not geography, unlit and unreformed. The Turf Tavern — a thirteenth-century pub reached through an alley, where generations have failed to work.

The way to do it

Come in term, when the place is functioning not performing. Check which colleges are open — most admit visitors for a few hours a day, and the porter's word is final. Take one library tour and one museum, then spend the rest walking: the interest here is in accumulation, not in individual sights. Punt if the weather allows, and hire someone to pole if you value your dignity.

One perfect day

Coffee on the Covered Market's edge, then the Bodleian's first tour of the day for Duke Humfrey's and the Divinity School ceiling. Up St Mary's tower for the view over the domes and spires. Late morning in the Pitt Rivers among the shrunken heads and fire-making kits, arranged by an obsessive Victorian logic. Pub lunch at the Turf. Afternoon punting on the Cherwell from Magdalen Bridge, or a college garden if the river is busy. Evensong at Magdalen or New College at six, sung by a choir that has been doing it for six hundred years and costs nothing to hear. Dinner in Jericho, then the walk back through Christ Church Meadow in the dark.

Grand hotels

The Randolph — 1866 neo-Gothic opposite the Ashmolean, the city's only grand hotel and the one everyone means. Old Parsonage — a 1660 stone house on the Banbury Road with a walled garden and a good bar, quieter and more Oxford.

When to go

Best expression: May, for Eights Week rowing, gardens open and full term in progress. Consider: late autumn term, when the light is low, the libraries are lit and the tourists have gone. Avoid if possible: August, when the students are away and the town is entirely visitors.

The frame

Ideal stay 2 nights · Minimum 1 night · Best arrival train from London Paddington, 1 hour · Airport LHR, 75 km · Walkability exceptional and flat · Best without a car yes, and cars are actively discouraged