To meander the streets of Oxford is to walk in the footsteps of giants and geniuses. Stephen Hawking, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, CS Lewis, TS Eliot and 43 prime ministers teeter at the tip of an iceberg of behemoths whose minds have been cultivated here.
And there is always the simmering sense that, in this effervescent crucible of learning, the world’s next great wunderkind is being raised amid the ‘dreaming spires’ famously eulogised by poet, Matthew Arnold. But as Henry James, another towering mind, once wrote: “Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.” And there is no finer way to spend a day than idling among the town’s many treasures, from its bastions of culture to its legendary pubs.
Oxford sits about as far
