In August 2022 we decided to take advantage of the late bank holiday in order to spend a weekend in Oxford, somewhere we’d only ever visited briefly together once before. This is the first post in a series documenting what we did over this weekend and in it I’ll be covering the first night and the start of the first full day in the famous university city.
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.