Oxford

Oxford is a small city with a very uneven spread of beds, and where you sleep changes the shape of a visit more than it would in most places. The historic core is compact enough that almost nothing inside the ring of colleges is more than ten minutes on foot from anything else, so a central room buys you the ability to come back to it mid-afternoon, drop your bags and go out again - which matters more than it sounds when the museums and college openings are scattered across the day.

The grandest addresses are the converted townhouses and coaching inns on the High Street, St Giles' and Beaumont Street. These are period buildings with the quirks that implies: sloping floors, awkward staircases, rooms that vary enormously between the cheapest and the best. They are also the properties with the good restaurants attached, and in a city where the best tables book out weeks ahead during term that is a real advantage. Expect to pay a clear premium, and expect parking to be limited, chargeable and sometimes off-site.

The mid-range sits slightly out from the middle - the Banbury and Woodstock roads to the north, Iffley and Abingdon roads to the south, and the streets around the station. These are largely Victorian villas converted into hotels, with a handful of chain properties near the river and the business park. You lose a few minutes' walking and gain both space and value, and the northern approaches in particular have very frequent buses.

Bed and breakfasts and guest houses are the traditional Oxford answer and there are still a good number of them, concentrated in Headington to the east, along the Abingdon Road and in the residential streets north of Summertown. They are typically family-run, breakfast is included and taken properly, and many have off-street parking, which is the single most useful thing you can have here if you are driving.

Whenever you come, book early for late June, when graduation ceremonies fill every room in the city, and for the start of the academic year in early October.

Much of Oxford is free to look at from the street, but a handful of places justify the ticket price and the queue.

• The Bodleian Library and Radcliffe Camera - one of the oldest libraries in Europe and still a legal deposit collection. Guided tours take you into the fifteenth-century Duke Humfrey's Library and the medieval Divinity School with its extraordinary vaulted ceiling; the domed Radcliffe Camera next door is the single most photographed building in the city.
• Christ Church - the grandest of the colleges, with a cathedral doubling as its chapel, the Great Hall that inspired countless film sets, and a picture gallery holding drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael. Its meadow, open free of charge, runs down to the Thames and is the best short walk in Oxford.
• The Ashmolean Museum - Britain's first public museum, opened in 1683 and rebuilt behind its classical facade into a bright, well-lit modern gallery. Entry is free and the collection ranges from Minoan pottery and Egyptian mummies to Powhatan's mantle and a fine room of Pre-Raphaelites.
• The Pitt Rivers Museum - reached through the Victorian iron-and-glass hall of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, this is an anthropological collection arranged by type rather than by region, crammed into dim wooden cases. It is unlike any other museum in the country and it is also free.
• Punting on the Cherwell - hire a flat-bottomed boat and a pole from Magdalen Bridge Boathouse or the Cherwell Boathouse in north Oxford and push yourself upstream past the Botanic Garden and the deer park. Expect to be bad at it for the first twenty minutes; almost everyone is.
• The tower of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin - a tight spiral stair on the High Street opens onto the best view in Oxford, looking straight down into the Radcliffe Camera's dome with the spires and quadrangles laid out around it.
• The Covered Market - trading since 1774 and still a working market rather than a food court, with butchers hanging game in the window, a cobbler, a milliner, cake shops and a scatter of small cafes tucked between them.
• Port Meadow - an ancient common north-west of the centre that has never been ploughed, grazed by horses and cattle and prone to flooding into a temporary lake in winter. Walk the towpath to the riverside pubs at Binsey and Wolvercote and back.

Two things here are genuinely local. Oxford marmalade, dark and thick-cut, was first made commercially by Frank Cooper's wife in a High Street shop in the 1870s and is still sold in the city. The Oxford sausage, heavy on herbs and traditionally made with a mix of pork and veal, survives at the butchers' counters in the Covered Market, which is also where you should go for cheese, game, cakes and a proper fry-up at one of its long-standing cafes.

The pubs carry more of the city's history than the restaurants do. The Turf Tavern is buried down an alley off Holywell Street beneath the old city wall and is difficult to find on purpose. The Bear Inn claims a history going back to the thirteenth century and has thousands of snipped-off club ties pinned to its ceiling. The Lamb and Flag on St Giles' closed in 2021 and was reopened by a community-backed trust. Out at the edges, The Perch at Binsey and The Trout at Wolvercote are the two riverside pubs worth the walk across Port Meadow, both with big gardens and food that goes well beyond the usual.

For sit-down meals, Quod on the High Street is a reliable modern brasserie in a former bank, Gee's in a Victorian glasshouse on the Banbury Road does wood-fired Mediterranean cooking, and the Cherwell Boathouse pairs a serious wine list with a terrace over the river. The Cowley Road is where to go for value and variety - Arbequina for small Spanish plates and Oli's Thai among the most sought-after tables in the city. For a quick lunch, the Vaults and Garden cafe occupies a fourteenth-century room beside the Radcliffe Camera. Gloucester Green hosts a street food and antiques market several days a week, and Tap Social Movement, a brewery on the western edge of the city that employs prison leavers, is the pick of the local beer.

Oxford itself has almost no room for campsites - the land inside the ring road is either built on, owned by a college, or floodplain - so camping here means pitching in the villages and river valleys within a fifteen-mile ring and travelling in. That is less of a compromise than it sounds. The Park and Ride network is designed exactly for this, and one long-established club site sits close enough to the Abingdon Road that you can walk into the city along the Thames path in well under an hour.

The terrain is gentle: this is the upper Thames valley, flat to softly rolling, with the Cotswold escarpment rising away to the west. Most pitches are level meadow grass, and hardstandings are common because the clay holds water. Several of the better sites occupy former gravel workings flooded into lakes, and nothing here is remote - you are rarely more than a mile from a village pub.

The weather is about as kind as England gets. Oxfordshire is among the drier and warmer counties, with roughly 650 millimetres of rain a year and summer highs commonly in the low to mid twenties. The catch is the rivers: the Thames, Cherwell, Windrush and Evenlode all flood in winter and after prolonged rain, so low-lying riverside sites can lose pitches at short notice, and almost every site in the area closes for the winter. The practical season runs from March or April to late October, with May, June and September the sweet spot - long days, dry ground and no school-holiday premium.

Wild camping is not legal in England without the landowner's permission and there is no exception here. Port Meadow, the college land and the Thames path are all off limits, and enforcement close to the city is active. Use a proper site, ask permission if you want to pitch on farmland, and if you are travelling the Thames by boat or canoe arrange a mooring through the Environment Agency or a riverside pub rather than pitching on the bank.