Oxford was a Saxon burh, a Norman garrison town and Charles I's wartime capital long before it became a byword for scholarship. Three days of city walls, martyr sites, castle prisons and museum galleries trace nine centuries of it.
Robert D'Oilly's 1071 Norman fortress, later HM Prison Oxford until 1996. Climb St George's Tower (c.1074, the city's oldest building) and descend to the Saxon-era crypt. Costumed tours hourly, 10:00–16:20, roughly £16.50 adult.
Oxford's oldest structure still in use: a Saxon tower of about 1040, built into the old city wall beside the vanished North Gate. Inside is the cell door of the Bocardo prison that held Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley. Tower climb £3.
William of Wykeham founded New College in 1379 and agreed to maintain the 13th-century city wall running through his garden — Oxford's longest surviving medieval defensive stretch, still inspected by Winchester's mayor every few years.
Hertford Bridge (Thomas Jackson, 1914) spans a lane that follows the line of the medieval wall. Beneath it, a passage leads to the Turf Tavern, a 13th-century site licensed since 1381 and once outside the law of the walled city.
The 1860 neo-Gothic court where Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce debated Darwin seven months after Origin of Species appeared. Holds the last soft-tissue remains of the Oxford Dodo and the first-ever described dinosaur, Megalosaurus. Free, 10:00–17:00.
George Gilbert Scott's 1843 spire commemorates Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, burned for heresy under Mary I in 1555–56. The actual execution site is a small cobbled cross set into the road outside Balliol College on Broad Street.
Founded 1884 on General Pitt Rivers' typological system — objects grouped by function, not culture, in dense Victorian cases with handwritten labels. A rare surviving example of 19th-century museum thinking preserved intact. Free entry.
Christopher Wren's first major building (1664–69), modelled on Rome's Theatre of Marcellus and roofed with a trussed span that needed no interior columns. The thirteen carved herms outside are the third set, replaced in 1972.
Founded 1264, with Mob Quad (1288–1378) the oldest quadrangle in Oxford and a medieval chained library still in its 1590s fittings. Charles I's queen kept court here 1643–44 while he held Christ Church. Entry around £5.
Oxford's first industrial suburb, built for workers at Lucy's Eagle Ironworks and the Oxford University Press after the canal reached the city in 1790. St Barnabas Church (1869) is a Byzantine oddity funded by the Combe printing fortune.
Opened 1850 when the city churchyards filled after cholera outbreaks. Graves include Benjamin Jowett, Kenneth Grahame's family and Oxford's Victorian tradesmen — a working-class counterpoint to the college memorials. Free, open daylight hours.
The street linking the medieval city to Morris Motors, where William Morris built his first car in 1913 and employed 10,000 by the 1930s. Post-war Caribbean and South Asian arrivals to the plant shaped the shops and mosques standing today.