England · A day from London
The poet Matthew Arnold called Oxford the city of dreaming spires, and the name has stuck for good reason. Wander its compact center and you are surrounded by nearly a thousand years of scholarship, set in honey-colored stone: cloistered quadrangles, soaring chapels, hidden gardens and towers that have watched generations of students come and go since the Middle Ages.
At the heart of it all are the colleges, each its own little world behind an ancient gate. Christ Church, with its grand quad and Tom Tower, is the most famous, its dining hall a model for the one in the Harry Potter films. Nearby rise the great set-pieces of the university: the domed Radcliffe Camera, perhaps England's most beautiful library, and the Bodleian, one of the oldest libraries in Europe, whose reading rooms have served scholars for centuries.
Oxford makes a wonderful day trip from London, an easy hour by train, though it richly rewards an overnight. We love to round out a visit with the city's gentlest pleasure: drifting a flat-bottomed punt down the River Cherwell on a summer afternoon, the spires sliding by beyond the willows.
