Great Expectations

Home to the oldest university in the English-speaking world, founded 850 years ago, Oxford is a city full of history, magic and intrigue?

- Neil Jones

Climb to the top of one of Oxford’s lofty viewpoints – Carfax clock tower, the Sheldonian Theatre, the University Church of St Mary the Virgin – and you’ll see the ‘dreaming spires’ still bravely pricking the skyline, long after Victorian poet Matthew Arnold first celebrated them in his 1866 poem Thyrsis.

In college and street, where black-gowned students scurry and bowler-hatted ‘Bulldogs’ prowl (a throwback to the university police), time may seem to have stood still. But while punting and genteel picnics on the river have yet to fall out of fashion, the oldest university in the English-speaking world has rarely rested on its laurels.

Recently ranked the world’s top university by London-based academic magazine Times Higher Education, through the centuries Oxford has produced an unrivalled 27 British prime ministers – St Hugh’s College graduate Theresa May being the latest – as well as at least 30 international leaders and 50 Nobel Prize winners. Famous Oxonians range from medieval scholar Roger Bacon and Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh to writer Oscar Wilde and inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Movers and shakers: one and all.

There was some form of teaching here in the 11th century, however it was from the key date of 1167, when King Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris, that developments accelerated – making 2017 a notable 850th anniversary in Oxford’s foundation story.