More of the Other Place
Sep. 5th, 2005 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanAnd so the story concludes...
After the blistering pace set by Saturday, Sunday was always going to be slower. After the aforementioned empty English breakfast, I slithered out into the morning, and after a certain amount of aimless wandering, found myself at Oxford's most OTT college - Keble.
I am rather fond of Keble College - it's a guilty pleasure. Anyone with even the faintest pretence of caring about architecture is expected to hate Keble College Oxford as a matter of course - all thats' worst in Victorian Gothic pastiche, its screamingly overdone brickwork an insult to the Medieval and Renaissance splendour of the rest of the city. Unfortunately, I still like Keble - there is something magnificent about its sheer overpowering loudness, from the chocolate-box brickwork to the mosaic-strewn Chapel.
It is, however, a bit much for 9:30 on a Sunday morning, so I didn't stop too long.
I spent the rest of the morning wandering vaguely round Christ Church meadow, and pondering on that most vexed and elusive of questions - is there really any difference between Oxford and Cambridge, and which is the more wonderful.
I believe there are differences between the two places, but like most people, cannot really define them. Thus what follows is entirely my own largely untutored opinion, and I admit at the outset that any points I make could probably be refuted with specific exmaples in a twinkling, so don't bother:
The fundamnetal difference between the two places is one of space - there just seems to be more of it in Oxford. In Cambridge, colleges are crammed together, sometimes seeming like a puzzle from the Krypton Factor. While Oxford colleges sit sometimes cheek by jowl, there is more orderliness about them, and they are more generally more spacious within.
Perhaps the space issue is most clearly demonstrated by Christ Church meadow - this long stretchy of parkland runs behind three colleges down to the Isis, half a mile distant. On a misty morning, the distant belts of trees look like they could be the edge of the countryside. Were the area in Cambridge, they'd have jammed another two colleges into it, with ginnels between them down to the river.
And yet, perversely, Oxford also feels more urban than Cambridge - the centre feels more like a real city. Much ink has been spilled (not least by Bill Bryson) on the desecration of modern Oxford by shops and town planners - while I accept that Queen Street in particular is probably a shadow of what it was 50 or 100 years ago, that is the price of having a modern city that people actually want to shop in. Cornmarket Street and Queen Street feel like actual shopping streets, where you are likely to find what you are looking for - there is no exact aklternative in Cambridge, without either trotting round various broken-up shiopping streets, or trudging out to the Grafton a half-mile away. You could say that a certain area of Oxford - Cornmarket Street, Queen Street, and the various alleyways squeezed up against the Westgate Centre - has been set aside for chain stores, banks and other hideous but necessary accoutrements of the modern world, leaving Borad Street, the High, and all the glories between and around them to remain (temporary insanities of the Colleges excepted) inviolate. Personally I find this a perfectly acceptable solution - Lewes in Sussex is another good example - and it keeps the centre of a city alive without destroying the best bits.
As you will have guessed by now, despite local bias and so forth, I think I still prefer Oxford to Cambridge. Cambridge is probably prettier, square inch for square inch, and Oxford's riverfront can't match the Backs, but there is a wider range of architectural glories in Oxford. In cambridge, all the really pretty bits are in the one place - between Kings Parade and the river - whereas in Oxford you have Radcliffe Square, the High, Broad Street, the Bridge of Sighs (or rather the Other Bridge of Sighs - given the first one linked a courtroom and a prison, perhaps the allusion is not too wise), the meadows around Magdalen, and so on and so on.
Admittedly, this preference may be because I went from knowing Cambridge not at all to knowing it all too well in a very short space of time, and that absence has made the heart grow fonder in respect of its rival, but still I think Oxford just about takes the palm.
After all this wandering and musing, I was about ready for a spot of lunch, and was fortunate enough:
a) to have made arrangements to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lanfykins, who I hadn't seen in far too long, and
b) to have another of the country's finest pubs, the Turf, at our disposal.
The thing that makes the Turf so trememdous, apart from its selection of drinks, good food and plentiful outdoor seating, is that the bloody tourists can't find it. This is almost certainly deliberate - the nondescript wynd beneath the Bridge of Sighs that leads to it could easily be signposted, if the landlord wanted it to be. However, since the pub is usually full to bursting with the cognoscenti anyway, they have no need of tourists, and if gives the place the air of a secret and magical garden.
It is also one of the realtively few pubs I know that does Weston's Old Rosie, the best scrumpy available that can _usually_ be relied upon not to send you blind. It took a titanic effort of will to avoid drinking the stuff, but I felt that any quantity of 7.3% scrumpy would be a disastrous move, with a cross-country bus ride to be survived.
Two hours of sunshine, roast beef, and catching up with my delightful dining companion left me in a mellow frame of mind, if in need of a pee (despite its manifold glories, the Turf does fall down rather on sanitary provisions - more Quaint Olde orld Charm, I assume), and that persisted, just about, until I waddled my way back to Gloucester Green, and the bus home.
After the blistering pace set by Saturday, Sunday was always going to be slower. After the aforementioned empty English breakfast, I slithered out into the morning, and after a certain amount of aimless wandering, found myself at Oxford's most OTT college - Keble.
I am rather fond of Keble College - it's a guilty pleasure. Anyone with even the faintest pretence of caring about architecture is expected to hate Keble College Oxford as a matter of course - all thats' worst in Victorian Gothic pastiche, its screamingly overdone brickwork an insult to the Medieval and Renaissance splendour of the rest of the city. Unfortunately, I still like Keble - there is something magnificent about its sheer overpowering loudness, from the chocolate-box brickwork to the mosaic-strewn Chapel.
It is, however, a bit much for 9:30 on a Sunday morning, so I didn't stop too long.
I spent the rest of the morning wandering vaguely round Christ Church meadow, and pondering on that most vexed and elusive of questions - is there really any difference between Oxford and Cambridge, and which is the more wonderful.
I believe there are differences between the two places, but like most people, cannot really define them. Thus what follows is entirely my own largely untutored opinion, and I admit at the outset that any points I make could probably be refuted with specific exmaples in a twinkling, so don't bother:
The fundamnetal difference between the two places is one of space - there just seems to be more of it in Oxford. In Cambridge, colleges are crammed together, sometimes seeming like a puzzle from the Krypton Factor. While Oxford colleges sit sometimes cheek by jowl, there is more orderliness about them, and they are more generally more spacious within.
Perhaps the space issue is most clearly demonstrated by Christ Church meadow - this long stretchy of parkland runs behind three colleges down to the Isis, half a mile distant. On a misty morning, the distant belts of trees look like they could be the edge of the countryside. Were the area in Cambridge, they'd have jammed another two colleges into it, with ginnels between them down to the river.
And yet, perversely, Oxford also feels more urban than Cambridge - the centre feels more like a real city. Much ink has been spilled (not least by Bill Bryson) on the desecration of modern Oxford by shops and town planners - while I accept that Queen Street in particular is probably a shadow of what it was 50 or 100 years ago, that is the price of having a modern city that people actually want to shop in. Cornmarket Street and Queen Street feel like actual shopping streets, where you are likely to find what you are looking for - there is no exact aklternative in Cambridge, without either trotting round various broken-up shiopping streets, or trudging out to the Grafton a half-mile away. You could say that a certain area of Oxford - Cornmarket Street, Queen Street, and the various alleyways squeezed up against the Westgate Centre - has been set aside for chain stores, banks and other hideous but necessary accoutrements of the modern world, leaving Borad Street, the High, and all the glories between and around them to remain (temporary insanities of the Colleges excepted) inviolate. Personally I find this a perfectly acceptable solution - Lewes in Sussex is another good example - and it keeps the centre of a city alive without destroying the best bits.
As you will have guessed by now, despite local bias and so forth, I think I still prefer Oxford to Cambridge. Cambridge is probably prettier, square inch for square inch, and Oxford's riverfront can't match the Backs, but there is a wider range of architectural glories in Oxford. In cambridge, all the really pretty bits are in the one place - between Kings Parade and the river - whereas in Oxford you have Radcliffe Square, the High, Broad Street, the Bridge of Sighs (or rather the Other Bridge of Sighs - given the first one linked a courtroom and a prison, perhaps the allusion is not too wise), the meadows around Magdalen, and so on and so on.
Admittedly, this preference may be because I went from knowing Cambridge not at all to knowing it all too well in a very short space of time, and that absence has made the heart grow fonder in respect of its rival, but still I think Oxford just about takes the palm.
After all this wandering and musing, I was about ready for a spot of lunch, and was fortunate enough:
a) to have made arrangements to meet
lanfykins, who I hadn't seen in far too long, andb) to have another of the country's finest pubs, the Turf, at our disposal.
The thing that makes the Turf so trememdous, apart from its selection of drinks, good food and plentiful outdoor seating, is that the bloody tourists can't find it. This is almost certainly deliberate - the nondescript wynd beneath the Bridge of Sighs that leads to it could easily be signposted, if the landlord wanted it to be. However, since the pub is usually full to bursting with the cognoscenti anyway, they have no need of tourists, and if gives the place the air of a secret and magical garden.
It is also one of the realtively few pubs I know that does Weston's Old Rosie, the best scrumpy available that can _usually_ be relied upon not to send you blind. It took a titanic effort of will to avoid drinking the stuff, but I felt that any quantity of 7.3% scrumpy would be a disastrous move, with a cross-country bus ride to be survived.
Two hours of sunshine, roast beef, and catching up with my delightful dining companion left me in a mellow frame of mind, if in need of a pee (despite its manifold glories, the Turf does fall down rather on sanitary provisions - more Quaint Olde orld Charm, I assume), and that persisted, just about, until I waddled my way back to Gloucester Green, and the bus home.
