oxford – Where is Phil now?

Oxford, the old bits

Oxford – Saturday 15 February 2025

I started this post soon after I visited, but am finishing over a month later, lounging on my bed in Delhi as I wind down an afternoon and await feeding time in the hotel I’m staying in. There will hopefully be a lot of Delhi, and other holiday, related posts over time, though I’ve lost the blogging urge.

In the last couple of posts I’ve touched on getting myself ready for the few days I spend in Delhi and I think it has paid off to a degree, I’ve coped well so far (day three), we’ll see.

I’m sort of just posting this for the record.

Oxford is a university town. While I’m sure many of those who have lived in this small city for generations will disagree with me to some degree, but, the university is Oxford and for this reason alone it is a hugely popular tourist destination. It was busy, and I’m glad I chose to overnight on Friday rather than Saturday. I almost had to battle against the stream of visitors coming from the station to the old town in the wind and rain late on Saturday morning as I headed home. Friday was less frantic and the weather was significantly better.

There are records of teaching in Oxford as far back as 1096 making it the oldest English language university in the world. It expanded rapidly in 1167 when King Henry II banned English students from going to Paris University. The university comprises 43 ‘colleges’, some of which I visited today. All students must belong to a college. Some of the colleges are incredibly old, for instance Balliol was founded in 1263 and claims to be the oldest college in Oxford, and the world.

A number of the buildings date back to the 1400 and 1500s, many constructed from yellow sandstone and they all look lovely. The old, university bit of town, is a great place to walk around, even though it was somewhat busy there were little oasis(es?) of peace if you wanted a moment of solitude.

Getting to the old town from the station, and the ‘hotel’ I stayed in nearby, you pass through some of the newer parts of Oxford, and it was looking a little sad to say the least. There are a lot of boarded up or otherwise closed shops and a few of the buildings look like they’re patiently waiting for the demolition that will put them out of their misery.

Once in the old centre I walked in many different circles and took lots of photos, and here they are. Sadly it was too long ago for me to actually remember the names of the buildings and colleges. At least in Delhi I’ve been keeping a rough record of what I’ve photographed! Oxford id lovely though and I’m really glad I finally spent some time there, it was long overdue..

To finish, here is a stuffed kakapo found in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a hand segue to the next post which will about New Zealand.

Oxford Brutalism

Oxford – Saturday 15 February 2025

A couple of posts ago I noted that I’m going to ‘practise’ being on my own before I spend solo time in Delhi as we make our individual journeys home from New Zealand. Eleanor and I fly to Auckland on 5 March and spend a week there before we’re joined by a London friend, Paula. The three of us will road trip down New Zealand to Dunedin, where we then separate. I fly to Brisbane for a night to see my family before going to Delhi. Eleanor and Paula spend a few more days in New Zealand then go to Sydney and Tokyo. I have 10 days on my own; and most of that will be spent somewhere that is different to the London I call home. Very different indeed.

I’ve not done the solo travel thing in a while and know I’m going to find aspects of life in Delhi challenging. I want to avoid finding aspects of being on own challenging while I contend with the challenges of Delhi. If I can manage the things I can control then I will be better positioned to manage the things I can’t. That is the theory anyway. Understanding more of what I feel I can control has been an objective of the last few weeks.

To help this I decided to taking a night away by myself and I chose Oxford. It’s not too far from London, it’s always busy with students, their visiting families and other tourists, and it has a good mix of historic architecture with a tiny bit of mid-century concrete mixed in. Other than its cold right now in the UK and Delhi will be hot, I’m going to find the Oxford experience will be just like Delhi, right?

I travelled up on Friday and though it was quite cold the sun was shining and it was a nice day to walk around semi-aimlessly taking photos of buildings of various ages.

Overall, it was a successful couple of days and I enjoyed myself and learned a more about how I react to being by myself and working with crowds and busy tourist venues. I will cover more of the two days in the next post, along with photos of the ‘proper’ Oxford. Today, I’m going to share photos of the limited number of 60s and 70s brutalist buildings to be found amongst the ‘old shit’.

Hilda Besse Building, aka the Common Room and Dining Hall at St. Antony’s College, was the most visually interesting of the brutalist buildings I wanted to see. A number of the concrete buildings, and seemingly a third of Oxford were surrounded by scaffold. A full refurbishment of Hilda was completed in 2021, and thankfully the building has remained true to John Partridge’s original 1971 design. The interior is supposed to be lovely, but like everywhere these days you need a pass to get through the security barriers. I love the window frames and have not seen the like before. They look so much like wartime bunkers I expected to see gun barrels poking out of them.

Just around the corner is the Denys Wilkinson Building, the astrophysics department of Oxford University. Its neighbour, the Thom Building, is being renovated and there was scaffold all over the place and a number of the paths around the building were blocked which was frustrating. I’m learning to accept that not everything is going to go to plan when I travel, so this was good. I also was trying to memorise directions between places, a ‘skill’ I feel I’m losing as I’ve become reliant on my phone to always be there to give me directions. This worked well so was I pleased to find I can do it with little effort, and getting slightly misplaced is often part of the enjoyment.

The Philip Dawson design Nuclear Physics Building first opened in the late 60s and was renamed The Denys Wilkinson Building in 2001 to honour the famous physicist, (and no, I don’t know physicists, famous or otherwise; being interested in brutalist architecture teaches you many things). The fan building houses a Van de Graff Generator.

I know nothing about the Oxford Centre for Innovation building other than where it is, and that it was difficult to photograph as it’s partly wrapped around Oxford Castle Mound and the castle butts up against the back of it.

It was raining on Saturday, and windy, cold and quite unpleasant, so after photographing the innovation Centre I took myself to the Ashmolean Museum, stopping for an excellent coffee in the most unfriendly and pretentious café I’ve been to, and I’m unfriendly and pretentious so have some expertise in this field!

I arrived at the Ashmolean soon after it opened and it was nice and quiet. I had a look around most of the galleries; there is a lot of pottery, something I have very limited interest in. I was seeking out galleries that housed North Indian and South East Asian collections as I’m still fascinated by the complex ancient history of these places as well as the religions that were so key to the buildings and art that were created hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. I was momentarily distracted in the Egyptian collection and this magnificent relief on the side of the tomb of Nubian King Taharqa who died in 664BC, he is believed to have been the last black pharaoh of Egypt. The detail is stunning!

The Indian and Asian galleries were interesting, with some lovely Buddhist and Hindi artefacts. I was especially interested in this beautiful 16th bronze of Saint Tirumankai Alvar which is soon to be returned to it’s home in the Tamil Nadu region of India. While it’s not know whether this statue was stolen, it also can’t be proved that it wasn’t so the museum is returning it. Much as I like to see these lovely objects in UK museums they should be returned to their traditional homes.

As the weather hadn’t improved while I was in the museum. I caught the train back home to London where Eleanor and went to a fantastic restaurant in Stoke Newington to not celebrate Valentines Day.

The next post will be all about the Hogwartsean, Disneyesque Oxford we all know and love.

I know how those heads feel !

Saturday 01 June 2013

Well it’s June the first – official first day of the English summer, and for a change the weather took notice and we had an even better day than yesterday, which was not too bad at all.

Last night El and I met some of her friends in one of the pubs near where she lives in Walthamstow, east London for a drink or two and I was feeling the effects of too many glasses of rose when I finally woke from a bad sleep. Today was not a day for lingering as we were off to Oxford to visit El’s oldest son and to have a quick look around the city.

We caught the train from Paddington Station, and I really should have taken a photo there as it is a pretty cool place, but I was desperately in need of caffeine and had to go find coffee before we boarded the train. The train was packed – not in a Sri Lankan way of course, no-one had legs hanging out of open doors and I am sure there was no-one on the roof either, just packed in an orderly English way! The first sunny weekend in a while meant a lot of people were heading out of the city for the day or weekend.

Oxford was no different to the train and the high street was very full.

We wandered down through the high street and into some of the old part of Oxford town where all the colleges are. The old part is lovely – ancient colleges and university buildings form the centre of the old part and it is nice place to stroll, albeit rather crowded….

There a number of very famous colleges – such as Jesus, Balliol and Christchurch, some are open to the public and some are not. All the colleges I could see seem to surround greens and I popped into one that we were allowed into, though stupidly I did not write its name down.

El’s son is studying at Brasenose College, which has been in the centre of Oxford since the early 16th century. The main buildings are from the 17th and 18th century. The public are not allowed in, but as we were meeting El’s son there we were allowed a brief tour of the place, beautiful ! Not allowed on the grass though 🙂

We visited the quad of the famous Bodelian Library, which I also really liked.

It was then time to go and hunt down some food and a cool drink, we walked past the not so famous “bridge of sighs” in Oxford.

Before heading to the Turf Tavern for a ginger beer…

Our next mission was to visit the Pitt River museum, which I think is the coolest museum I have been too. The main floor is packed with interesting things to see, including shrunken heads – which is why we went. The main focus of the museum seems to be anthropological and there was some quite interesting NZ artefacts there as well, somewhere I would highly recommend visiting if you had a couple of days in Oxford.

We had lunch in a kebab shop and then farewelled El’s son and then El and I went for a walk around the botanical gardens – and a lie down on the grass in the sun.

It was soon time to head back to London, I had only seen a tiny fraction of Oxford and I am definitely going to head back.