Oxford and Cambridge
July 14, 2007
I had a week of work in London in the middle of July. I decided to take a week of vacation prior to that and took my wife and my baby with me for both weeks. We had a wonderful time the first week, taking day trips to places near London (such as Salisbury/Stonehenge and Dover). We spent one day at Oxford and one day at Cambridge, universities connected to some of my favorite authors.
Oxford
In Oxford, we ate lunch at The Eagle and Child, a pub where the informal literary circle known as the “Inklings” met weekly for years. We took a walking tour of the campus, which included walking through the chapel at Exeter College (where J.R.R. Tolkien was a student) and seeing the Magdalen College tower from a distance (where C.S. Lewis was a professor). We also walked through Radcliffe Square around Radcliffe Camera and next to the Bodleian Library.
I would have liked to spend more time there, seeing more of the colleges and libraries and museums and just walking around campus. (I regret that I did not participate in the Honors at Oxford summer program when I was an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma.)
Cambridge
We took a walking tour at Cambridge. We visited a few colleges, including King’s College and it’s famous chapel. (I love how green and manicured the lawns are in the middle of both the “courts” at Cambridge and the “quadrangles” at Oxford.) The Cam River runs through the middle of the town and seems to play a much more important part of life at Cambridge than does the Thames at Oxford, and seemingly everyone else was going “punting”. We ended the day visiting Magdalene College, where C.S. Lewis was a professor for the last ten years of his life.
