Rose Astor's Oxford
Where To Go In The City of Dreaming Spires...
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.
My other love is tennis and I play regularly at NOLTC which has the best coaches, I am terrified my weekly lesson with head coach Tom will be nabbed if I’m away for it so I try and plan work around the lesson!
After exercise comes breakfast, which I take seriously. I often take my laptop and work in a café. The Jericho Café is my favourite spot for a late breakfast. Jericho itself is Oxford’s version of the neighbourhood you’ve always wanted to live in but never quite managed — the kind of place where the bookshops are good and the coffee is better and people carry tote bags unironically. I’ll sometimes grab a takeaway lunch from Branca’s Deli – Oxford’s answer to Ottolenghi and on really piggy days I’ll head to Barefoot Café for a doorstop wedge of homemade lime or mango cake on my way home.
Back in Summertown I live in Daunt Books, I could chat to the staff all day they are so well read. I buy approximately one book a week there and I have made peace with this entirely. There is a phrase I heard once that lodged itself so firmly in my brain I have basically tattooed it on my personality: “how you spend your days is how you spend your life.” My guilty pleasure is reading in the late afternoon, occasionally in a supine position, occasionally asleep. The Spanish and Italians know what they are doing with this one. As they do with food, Mamma Mia on South Parade is where we go for a cosy supper and Kopitiam’s marmite chicken as reviewed by Giles Coren is another favourite local. They know our orders which feels like the highest form of neighbourhood belonging.
And then there is Gail’s which stocks my brother’s Bruern Farms sourdough. The bread is delicious and you should buy it wherever you find it. I grab coffee there most mornings and often bump into a friend.
For moving around all of this: I walk or cycle - I have not driven during the week in what feels like years and plan never to do so again. Summertown Cycles are my quiet heroes — they never once roll their eyes when I trundle in needing my tyres pumped, which I do with embarrassing frequency.
My parents instilled a love of walking in me from the word dot. I’ve done so much research on walking trainers and my current favourite is On Cloud Cloudmonster 3 which I got from Bicester Village. Which is only 20 minutes away and has one of my favourite pubs The Double Red Duke. My favourite walk in Oxford is around Port Meadow, which is enormous and wild and has wild horses roaming about as though nobody told them this was a city. There is a Yellowstone energy to it — the sense that the landscape is getting on with its ancient business and you are merely passing through. I’ll grab my friend Charlotte (Danish co-owner of Verden and Votary which is genuininly all I use) between work calls and we will put the world to rights, which usually ends up with me popping back to hers and nicking her latest samples.
The canal is my other great love, a thin silver thread connecting Summertown to the centre of town that manages to feel simultaneously like Paris (the Seine, the bridges, that quality of light) and like something entirely Oxonian. It is very “His Dark Materials”. I walk it when I head down to Westgate for the kind of shopping trip that is never practical, I will often make the pilgrimage for a pair of socks from John Lewis just to get in a decent walk.
I am secretly, slightly obsessively, in love with Oxford University. Not in a tourist way — in a “what if I actually studied here” way that I have fully committed to as a private fantasy. Most people don’t realise that you can visit the majority of the colleges during the year, just walk in, look up and feel the full weight of all that accumulated genius pressing down on you. I sometimes pop into New College for Evensong which is on every day at 6:15pm and free to all. My favourite college is probably Magdalen. My daughter and I got up at dawn on May Morning to stand outside and listen to the choir sing from the top of Magdalen Bell Tower, a tradition going back five hundred years, and I stood there in the early morning mist thinking: I am in a Working Title film, then scouted about for Leo Woodhall.
In winter, when the afternoons close in early, I become a devotee of the Phoenix Picturehouse and its early afternoon silver screenings. The audience is mostly octogenarians, several of whom nap audibly, and I feel entirely at home as a passionate supporter of the afternoon siesta in all its forms, cinematic or otherwise. The Oxford Playhouse and New Theatre are also gems. I’ve seen so many productions there — plays that have transferred to the West End, or arrived fresh from it. The most recent was Operation Mincemeat, which was brilliant in the way that makes you want to grab people on the street and insist they go immediately. It has also become one of my most reliable tricks for luring friends in from the Cotswolds — the promise of a play followed by steak frites in one of the leather booths at The Alice tends to do it. The friends who claim Oxford is too far suddenly find it entirely manageable.
Occasionally I pop out of Oxford during the week but other than London for work or home for housemin it’s hard to lure me away. A walk and good food are usually bait, such as the cheese toastie at The Cheese Shed at Nettlebed Creamery . My friend Rose Grimond — an Oxford alumna — runs it. The toasties are honestly the best in the United Kingdom and I have researched many. I pair them with a long walk in the Chilterns with a friend usually with my All Trails App, which earns you the toastie and then some.
When my husband commutes up from London (50 minutes on the train) it tends to be a Deliveroo night which feels like a huge treat after years of living off proper cooking in the country. On the other evenings, my daughter and I cook together from the app Recime, pulling ingredients from M&S or the organic shop Wild Honey in Summertown. On the days I need to head to London for meetings, I walk to the station along the canal and if I need to fly anywhere for work I’ll try and book from Heathrow which is so easy to get to.
Rose Astor is a freelance travel writer and an Independent Travel Advisor with Glimpse Guides.
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