One of the biggest hurdles we faced ahead of this trip to Oxford was picking a hotel because, it turns out, Oxford absolutely hates the idea of anyone from outside the city coming to it for a stay somewhere. Could we find car parks? Yes. Could we find hotels? Yes. Could we find hotels with car parks? Not so easily. And worse, the hotels all seemed to be in residents parking zones so the option of parking on the road nearby got thrown out of the window. I have feelings about these zones and those feelings are that they should all be removed countrywide, and anyone who supports them should be shot into the sun.

Anyway, we eventually settled for The Galaxie as it was a good price, had parking, and seemed like it would be an easy walk into the city for exploring during the day. The hotel proved to be a very nice one – you can see photos below of our room because people really like to see photos of hotel rooms and I’m feeling in a helpful mood – but the parking wasn’t the ideal solution we’d hoped for. The car park was small. While we were able to find a spot to park on arrival, it would prove to be handy that we didn’t plan on moving the car the following day as it was blocked in from that point. The day after that we’d need to get the hotel staff to find the owner of another car to move it out of our way so we could head off for the day and we’d end up not being able to park when returning, leading to a lot of driving around to find somewhere that didn’t have parking restrictions. I’m sure I’ll mention this again when I get around to writing about that day’s activities later in this Oxford weekender series.

As we’d driven up on a Friday evening after work we decided not to walk the fair distance into Oxford for the first night and instead headed a few hundred metres away to The Dewdrop Inn just to grab a bite to eat and a few drinks. It was a very nice pub, had good service, and did some very nice cocktails.

The next morning started with breakfast in the hotel’s conservatory; a lovely setting.

Our plan for our first full day in Oxford was a simple one: walk into Oxford and see what grabbed our attention. Our hotel was based on Banbury Road and simply following its length would take us into the city centre. Just before it reached that point, however, we could see there was a large park off to one side and we figured we’d have a walk around that as we were setting off early enough that nothing would likely be open by the time we reached sites of interest. The walk along Banbury Road was abut one and a half kilometres long and lined with plenty of interesting architecture to admire.

The park we’d seen was called University Parks. Plural. It just looked like one park to us but fine, Oxford, you be you and pluralise it. We ended up walking a full circuit and managed to avoid being run over by the hordes of joggers using it. The park was a nice green space; nothing spectacular about it, although it did host a nice pond. We’d also spotted on the map that there was something called the “J.R.R. Tolkien Bench” which we thought might be a historically interesting spot that the author used to sit at or perhaps a bench in a style that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Middle Earth. Yeah, let’s just say that if you go to University Parks to see this bench then make sure you’re wearing your Pants of Disappointment.

The walk around the park was nice enough and ate up enough time for us to make our first stop of the day; this would be at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

One of the first things we admired in the museum was the building itself. This dates from the nineteenth century and is a delightful example of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture with a fabulous glass and iron roof.

There was plenty to enjoy at the museum if you’ve got any interest in palaeontology or evolution or mineralogy, as you can no doubt tell from the photos above. One of the things we particularly liked was being able to touch an iron meteorite that had come from the asteroid belt. How could we not?

Connected to the natural history museum was the Pitt Rivers Museum so we popped in there too. This is a building that houses an immense amount of artefacts from all over the world and from all periods. While there was a lot to see here we found that a lot of it was repetitive and it was hard to be excited by, for example, the twentieth example of a Buddha statue. Doubtlessly, for people doing research Pitt Rivers must be a fabulous treasure trove of dates and details, but our general feeling was that this was closer to an antiques shop than a museum. Still interesting, still worth a look, but we weren’t wowed by the place.

We enjoyed the two museums here overall, though, and with them being free to enter there’s no reason to not visit them if you’re in Oxford.

That concludes this first part of our weekend visit to Oxford. In the next post in this series we’ll be continuing our museum theme and visiting the city’s most famous example of one, the Ashmolean.

This visit to the Ashmolean took place in August 2022 and was part of a weekend break in Oxford. Prior to looking around Oxford’s most famous museum we’d looked around the Natural History and Pitt Rivers museums following a walk from our hotel.

For us, and I imagine for many people, the stand-out items on display at the Ashmolean were those from the Egyptian, Roman, and Assyrian collections, but if you like paintings, sculptures, or treasures such as rare violins or timepieces then you will find something to interest you.

In the next post in this series covering our short stay in Oxford we’ll be visiting the Botanic Garden and rewarding our morning and afternoon’s cultural tour of the city with a small wander around some of its pubs. It’s what we do.

After a quick stop for something to eat and a few drinks we set off instead for the botanic gardens. This took us along Oxford’s High Street and past architecture quite typical for the area. Several colleges and University Church of St Mary the Virgin were among the landmarks that we strolled past.

The Oxford Botanic Garden was founded in 1621 as a physic garden – a garden for growing herbs for use in medicinal research – and today houses over five thousand species of flowers and plants. Situated along the banks of the River Cherwell – where people could be seen punting along it with varying degrees of success – it is broadly arranged in three sections: the Glasshouses, the Lower Garden, and the Walled Garden.

We started our wander through the garden with the Glasshouses. Numerous climate zones were represented in the occasionally cramped and very warm spaces here: a cloud forest, a water lily pond, a rainforest, a carnivorous plants house, and an arid zone for cactuses. Each had its appeal, but I’m always drawn to pitcher plants for some reason. It’s because I was a fly in a previous life.

We’re not botanists and our knowledge of flowers in general is extremely small, but the plants on show were attractive, some were clearly exotic and not native to these shores, and, ultimately, when it comes to nature, you either like it or you don’t. I won’t pretend to try to determine what each plant was, but if you’ve got an interest in flowers or what sorts of plants grow in different climates then it’s a great way to spend an hour or two.

It was good to get outside and into some fresh air after exploring the Glasshouses; as I mentioned, they could be a little cramped with a sensible one-way system of exploring their interior spaces that was only mostly observed by people visiting on the same day that we were there. The outside garden spaces were more typical of what you’d find in any English estate, but there were areas given over to medicinal herbs still among rare plants too.

One other area of the Walled Garden was the literary walk. It is known that authors such as Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien visited Oxford Botanic Garden, and if you’re a fan of the His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman or its TV adaptation then the bench that Will and Lyra pledge to sit on at noon each Midsummer’s Day in their respective worlds is located in the garden too, and quite likely smothered with other fans at that time if you’re thinking it might be nice to pop along there and do so as well.

That ended up being enough of Oxford’s cultural and historical elements for one day for us, and we would spend the rest of this day visiting some pubs. What can I say? We like pubs.

In the next post in this UK city break travelogue series we’ll be heading out from Oxford to take a look at the National Trust property of Stowe.

The gardens at Stowe are managed by the National Trust which is part of the reason that we visited them because we’ve maintained membership of the organisation for many years now, but the house is privately owned and run as a school, and with schools being understandably cautious about letting strangers wander the place with impunity there are restrictions on when you can visit and just how much of it you can see.

We visited Stowe on the final day of our weekend break in Oxford as it was not too great a distance to travel from our hotel in the city. After a walk around one half of the grounds we approached the house from the south lawn.

Stowe House looks impressive with its dominating six-columned portico in the centre reached up a full-width flight of steps, and with the two long east and west wings either side. The neoclassical building’s construction took a hundred years in four considerably shorter bursts of work between 1677 and 1779, and the original architect had previously worked under Sir Christopher Wren.

A pair of Medici Lions stands at the base of the steps leading up to the portico. Medici Lions are males with a paw resting on a sphere, with copies springing up all around the world. There’s a clear symbolism here of the powerful masculine force suppressing the representation of the world – that’s a nice message for schools to teach – and you can see that this form was brought across to China – where lions would have been nowhere near – with their own stylised versions of these sculptures, such as those at the Forbidden City in Beijing that we visited in 2008. Travel dropping. It’s like name dropping, but better.

Entry to Stowe House was just to the left of the steps. After buying our ticket we first passed into the North Hall. This was one of the oldest areas of Stowe, with the room dating to the 1730s. In it were sculptures of Roman deities: Diana, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Fans of libraries – and who doesn’t like a library? Don’t answer if you’re right wing – will like Stowe as it has three of them. Evidence of their use in the building’s normal role as a private school these days, rather than a museum snapshot of how it would have looked, was nice to see. The Large Library in the photo below takes up a decent chunk of the east wing of Stowe House.

The State Music Room provided some nice imagery for me with the polished surface of the large piano within reflecting the nicely-decorated apse and bust it held.

By far the most impressive room in Stowe House was the Marble Saloon. This was where cowboys would come to challenge one another to games to the death with coloured glass spheres. Wait. I’ve just checked and that’s not strictly accurate.

The Marble Saloon rises seventeen metres to an ornate, domed ceiling in an elliptical form. Beneath that are columns that appear to be marble but are really scagliola. Interestingly, the columns here are simpler in form than elsewhere inside and outside Stowe House, being Doric rather than Corinthian. The simplicity to me helps not to distract from the grand impression of the room as a whole. Niches between the columns hold replicas now but originally housed authentic Roman statues.

We finished our look around what we could of Stowe House by stepping out onto the north portico where we could see an equestrian statue of King George I dated to 1727.

If you’re visiting Stowe Gardens anyway and the house is open for viewing then it’s worth the time to look around. There’s not a huge amount to see, it would be fair to say, but the rooms have a grandeur to them that you shouldn’t deprive your eyeballs from viewing.

The land was purchased in the sixteenth century by a wealthy wool farmer, John Temple. By the turn of the eighteenth century the house and surrounding land and gardens had been properly designed, built, and expanded upon, and in these gardens were placed a large number of monuments, including a not insignificant number of temples, believed to be a humorous take on the family motto which translates to “How beautiful are the temples.”

During our visit to Stowe we roughly walked a circular route in a clockwise direction around the lake you see below with a visit inside Stowe House when we reached that. This post will contain a small selection of photos of Stowe Gardens to show off how attractive the place is. They’re better experienced in person, but that’s true of most things, of course.

The Gothic Temple dates from the middle of the eighteenth century and could be seen from a number of spots on the walk. We didn’t actually get up to it as we’d started to head away from it at the end before realising it was far enough away and up enough of a slope that I didn’t want to turn back and incur the wrath of my wife whose feet were already aching by that point. The temple is notable for the colour of the material used to build it; high amounts of iron were present in the stone chosen as opposed to the paler limestone used almost exclusively everywhere else on the property.

The Temple of Venus owes its design inspiration to the Italian Renaissance architect, Palladio, although the architect involved, William Kent, was British and responsible for several works at Stowe. It wouldn’t be the only Palladian architecture to be seen, either.

We spotted a small clearing in a wooded area and went to explore and that’s when we happened upon a swing. We’d arrived at Stowe quite early so we were the only ones around and decided we’d take turns on the swing, being the great big kids that we are. Genuinely a lot of fun. By the time we were about finished a few other people had suddenly turned up and we could tell they were waiting for us to leave so they could have a go too.

Some people may be aware that we’re fans of architecture. We’d never claim to be experts and our appreciation for designs and styles is largely simply that. The history, key figures, dates, the names of specific elements of architecture… yeah, don’t ask us questions about those things. We know what we like, we know perhaps a little more than the average bloke in the street, but it is just a very amateur sense of liking things and picking up the odd fact here and there. One thing I like, for instance, when spotting either Roman or Greek columns or homages to them, as you’d find in Stowe, is identifying what classical order they belong to, and if I’m hitting a stately home I like to see whether the style is consistent. Yes, I’m weird, what of it? You can see in the pictures of the Statue of Queen Caroline and the Rotondo below that while the columns are styled in different ways (fluted and unfluted), the capitals are both Ionic (the scroll-like swirls). This was the prevailing style at Stowe, but it wasn’t the only one, though.

The Grenville Column was notable for how different it looked to everything else, but we knew we’d seen something like it before. We couldn’t remember at the time, but upon discovering that it was an example of a rostral column, we realised that we’d seen a colourful pair years before when we’d visited Vasilyevsky Island, Saint Petersburg, Russia. This one was dedicated to a family member, Thomas Grenville, killed in action in 1747 aboard HMS Defiance.

The Shell Bridge is named for its shell decorations but it’s not actually a bridge at all. Rather, it’s a dam for the lake, and simply designed to look like a bridge.

At Stowe we saw another piece of architecture inspired by Palladio: one of the three near-identical Palladian Bridges in the UK. We had earlier in the year seen the first of those to be built, at Wilton House, Wiltshire, with this structure in Stowe following on a couple of years later in 1738.

Also built in 1738, making it the oldest example of its kind in England, the Chinese House was originally mounted on stilts, has been moved several times, but was purchased from its owners in Kildare by the National Trust in 1996 and returned to its original position. The design spurred a trend in landscape gardening for Chinese-inspired works at the time.

The final building we passed before finding ourselves back at the entrance to Stowe and a short walk from our car was the Temple of Friendship. Its partly ruined state is the result of an 1840 fire but it was interesting to me to see the simpler columns here. Whether you’d consider them Doric because of the capitals or Tuscan because the columns are also unfluted, is a matter of debate. As I mentioned before: it’s a very amateur interest in architecture I’ve got so I’m not the person with whom to have that debate.

Stowe was absolutely lovely to walk around, and the house was great to visit too. If you like architecture, sculptures, lakes, or just the idea of a lovely long walk through beautiful landscape then it’s well worth a visit.

We didn’t get up to much in Abingdon but it’s a very picturesque town and somebody might want to see some photos of it.

We ate up a little time before intruding by taking a quick walk around the Abbey Gardens then strolled our usual route past St Helen’s church and along the part of the Thames that snakes through Abingdon.

There was some minor excitement here when we happened upon a group of men on motorbikes, mopeds, and scooters, all gathered outside one of the houses on the waterfront. They looked like they were up to no good – well, it looked like they were in the act of stealing a bike from that house – but as we got nearer one of them came over to us and told us that they were delivery drivers and were recovering a bike that had been stolen from one of them a few days before, using the tracker on it to locate the house. It sounded plausible and we certainly weren’t going to make a big deal of it.