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Oxford is a city in Oxfordshire, sitting where the Cherwell joins the Thames — known locally as the Isis along this stretch — around 55 miles north-west of London, with a population of around 165,000. It grew around a ford for oxen, which gives the city its name, and became a significant Saxon burh before the arrival of scholars in the late eleventh century changed it permanently.
The University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, with teaching recorded from 1096. It grew rapidly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from Paris, and the collegiate system developed from the thirteenth century. Its buildings define the city — the Bodleian Library, one of the oldest in Europe and a legal deposit library; the Radcliffe Camera, the circular domed reading room that is among the most photographed buildings in Britain; Christ Church with its Tom Tower and Great Hall; the Sheldonian Theatre, Wren's first major work; and the Bridge of Sighs at Hertford. Matthew Arnold's phrase, the city of dreaming spires, has stuck for 150 years.
Oxford's intellectual output is hard to overstate — from Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus through to the discovery of penicillin's therapeutic use by Florey and Chain at the Dunn School in 1940, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in 2020. Its literary associations are equally dense: Lewis Carroll wrote Alice for the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church; Tolkien and C.S. Lewis met as the Inklings at the Eagle and Child; Philip Pullman set His Dark Materials in an alternative Jericho and Jordan College.
The city is not only the university. Morris Motors at Cowley, founded by William Morris in 1913, became one of the largest car plants in Britain and still builds the MINI, employing thousands — Oxford has long had two quite separate economies and identities, town and gown, north Oxford and Cowley.
Oxford sits on the A34 and A40 with the M40 close by, and Oxford and Oxford Parkway stations give services to London Paddington and Marylebone in around an hour. Housing ranges from medieval and Georgian college and city property to the Victorian villas of North Oxford — built for newly-permitted married dons and among the most expensive property in Britain — Jericho's terraces, interwar and post-war estates at Blackbird Leys and Barton, and new development at Northern Gateway. Oxford has the least affordable housing relative to earnings of any UK city.






