Alice's Shop & Folly Bridge: The Golden Afternoon

Why is it significant?

Notice this charming timber-framed shop with its bow front and dark beams sitting opposite Christ Church Meadow: Alice's Shop.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Notice this charming timber-framed shop with its bow front and dark beams sitting opposite Christ Church Meadow: Alice's Shop. Dating back to the fifteenth century, this cozy building was the sweet shop frequented by Alice Liddell in the eighteen sixties, where she spent her pocket money on barley sugar sweets and ginger beer.

Lewis Carroll loved this shop so much that he wrote it directly into Through the Looking-Glass as the Old Sheep Shop. In the book, Alice steps through the door and finds the shop kept by a knitting sheep in spectacles, while shelves filled with toys mysteriously float out of reach whenever she looks straight at them.

Look south down St Aldate's towards Folly Bridge, where the River Thames meets the Cherwell. On the sunny afternoon of July fourth, eighteen sixty-two, Lewis Carroll and his friend Reverend Robinson Duckworth rented a wooden rowing boat and rowed three young Liddell sisters up the river to Godstow for a picnic. During that five-mile row, to quiet the restless children, Carroll invented on the spot the tale of a bored girl who fell down a rabbit hole into a subterranean wonderland.

Today, this historic shop is a worldwide pilgrimage site for lovers of nonsense literature, preserving the golden afternoon when an Oxford mathematics tutor gave the English language the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter.