Rose Astor is a freelance travel writer and an Independent Travel Advisor with Glimpse Guides. She is also one of my greatest friends. Rose has been living in Oxford for the past few years and is a font of knowledge on all things in and around the city. I adore Oxford but despite living nearby for the last fifteen years, I still know very little about it.
Over to Rose, our brilliant Oxford insider…
There is a particular kind of madness that descends upon you when you fall in love with a city. Not a person, not an idea — an actual place, with actual streets and actual pigeons and a canal that smells faintly of diesel and Philip Pullman novels. Oxford did this to me. Quietly, efficiently and with the sort of confidence that only somewhere perpetually sure of its own genius could muster.
I live in Summertown during the school termtime week — an apartment, a bike, a son who needs depositing at school each morning, a daughter who is finishing her A levels around the corner and a long suffering husband who after initial confusion (because technically our home is out in the Cotswolds) now realises this is where to find us during the week.
The rhythm of my Oxford days is pretty simple. After school drop-off, I pull on my yoga gear (Noble Yoga is my go to) and cycle to Yogavenue in Summertown for one of Alessandro’s hot yoga classes. Alessandro is the owner and looks exactly as you’d imagine someone called Alessandro who runs a hot yoga studio would look. The classes are brutal in the best possible way, the kind of sweaty reckoning that makes you feel approximately immortal by 10am. It’s not expensive or fancy but he’s one of the best teachers I’ve found out of London.
