After work on Friday afternoon Dan and I boarded a train and left the hustle and bustle of London behind us for a quiet weekend break in the beautiful university town of Oxford, only an hours train ride from Paddington.
Because of twilight we were still able to sit out in the hotel gardens and have a drink in the sunshine on our arrival even though it was 8:30pm. We stayed in an old manor house which has been renovated into a nice but rather bland hotel called Hawkwell House. There is so much to see so after breakfast we hit the road armed with our guidebook to try and make sure we saw everything we wanted.
The university buildings are so beautiful and so many important people studied here including Tony Blair (this rather amusing photo of Tony in his Oxford days was in our guidebook), J.R.R Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Indira Gandhi, Iris Murdoch, Percy Shelly (he was expelled), Robert Browning, Stephen Hawking, Hugh Grant, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Palin and T.S Eliot just to name a few.
I was very excited to find Alice's Shop, a gift shop devoted to Alice in Wonderland and it was the actual shop that Alice Liddell used to buy sweets from and is mentioned as The Old Sheep Shop in Through the Looking Glass where Alice is served by some very bad tempered sheep. Lots of pounds spent in there!
After climbing Carfax Tower we headed to The Bear pub for a spot of lunch. It was graduation day and there were lots of graduates and their families so seats were hard to find but we manged to beat the rush (just) and secure a table in the oldest pub in Oxford. Built in 1242 it has very low ceilings and is sinking in parts. The food was great and the atmosphere fantastic.
Early on we stumbled across a little organic cafe in the garden of St Mary's church, directly across from the Radcliffe Camera where we spent a lot of time having tea and coffee in their beautiful garden which is full of herbs and wildflowers. Some of the tables are on top of old graves and when we were there on Sunday we could hear the singing from the church choir. We climbed the church tower too and although very crowed at the top, the views were much better than those from Carfax Tower.
Saturday night we were totally knackered so we headed into town for a quick row on the Thames and then a pub dinner. We went to an 11th century pub called The Crown which was very nice.
Sunday was a lazy day spent wandering the little lanes (unfortunately with all our bags) and then a little picnic in the park outside Christ Church College and meadow- very hot and sunny which was lovely. We had ice cream from a little shop which hand makes all their stock, I had 'Smelly Bee' which was honey and lavender flavoured- heaven in a paper cup!Can't wait to go back in the winter and see everything covered in snow!
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