Oxford Legends: Hogwarts Cloisters, Alice's River & Inklings Pubs
Walk through medieval quadrangles, Harry Potter filming sites, and the fantasy worlds of Tolkien and Lewis
Oxford · 7 stops · 12 min audio · Generated
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1. Christ Church Great Hall & Bodley Staircase: The Hogwarts Portal
St Aldate's, Oxford OX1 1DP
Gaze up at the magnificent sixteenth-century fan-vaulted ceiling curving above the Bodley Staircase at Christ Church. Supported by a single slender stone pillar carved in sixteen forty, this stone flight is one of the most recognizable filming locations in cinematic history. It was right here, on these broad stone steps, that Professor McGonagall first greeted the first-year wizards in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
What lies through those heavy oak doors at the top of the stairs? Step inside the Great Hall, founded by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in fifteen twenty-five and finished by King Henry the Eighth. Look at the three long wooden dining tables and the hammerbeam timber roof: filmmakers used this room as the exact blueprint to build the Great Hall of Hogwarts at Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden.
Look closely at the stained glass window on your right: look for the tiny portrait of a little girl in a yellow dress. That is Alice Liddell, daughter of the college dean Henry Liddell. In the eighteen sixties, an eccentric mathematics don named Charles Dodgson, better known to the world as Lewis Carroll, sat at these very high tables and dreamed up Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to entertain Alice and her sisters.
Thirteen British Prime Ministers and philosopher John Locke dined under these oil portraits. As students in black academic gowns still take their daily meals here beneath the chandeliers, the boundary between Oxford tradition and childhood magic dissolves.
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2. Alice's Shop & Folly Bridge: The Golden Afternoon
83 St Aldate's, Oxford OX1 1RA
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.
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3. Merton College & Mob Quad: Tolkien's Fellowship
Merton St, Oxford OX1 4JD
Step through the arched gate into Merton College and look across Mob Quad, widely considered the oldest collegiate quadrangle in Oxford, built between thirteen zero-four and thirteen eleven. Its medieval stone library upstairs has operated continuously since thirteen seventy-eight, complete with chained manuscripts and high leaded dormer windows that feel like a monastery fortress.
Who spent his most prolific scholarly years walking these flagstones? From nineteen forty-five until his retirement in nineteen fifty-nine, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien served as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Here, he spent hours lecturing on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry, including the heroic epic Beowulf.
Tolkien's academic rooms overlooked the quiet garden quadrangle and the ancient city wall. It was while walking these stone cloisters and Merton's rose garden that he finalized and prepared for publication his magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings, which was published in three volumes between nineteen fifty-four and nineteen fifty-five.
In the college fellowship garden grows an ancient mulberry tree planted in the seventeenth century, beside which Tolkien often sat with his pipe, listening to the chime of Christ Church bells and imagining the Ents marching across the valleys of Middle-earth.
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4. The Radcliffe Camera & Bodleian Library: The Restricted Archives
Radcliffe Square, Oxford OX1 3BG
Stand right here in the center of cobbled Radcliffe Square and look up at that glorious circular rotunda crowned by a soaring lead dome: the Radcliffe Camera. Designed by architect James Gibbs and completed in seventeen forty-nine with money bequeathed by royal physician John Radcliffe, this is Britain's earliest circular library and the architectural heart of Oxford University.
Did you know that beneath the cobbles under your boots lies an underground tunnel filled with millions of volumes? The Gladstone Link tunnel connects the Radcliffe Camera directly to the Old Bodleian Library, moving books via pneumatic tubes and electric trolleys beneath the historic square.
Just across the square sits Duke Humfrey's Library, the oldest reading room of the Bodleian, opened in fourteen eighty-eight with its carved timber ceiling and oak book presses. Harry Potter fans will instantly recognize Duke Humfrey's: it served as the Hogwarts Library in the movies, where Harry slips beneath his Invisibility Cloak into the Forbidden Section to search for Nicholas Flamel.
Below Duke Humfrey's sits the Divinity School, completed in fourteen eighty-eight with four hundred and fifty-five carved stone bosses. That magnificent Gothic vaulted hall became the Hogwarts Infirmary where Madam Pomfrey mends broken bones, and where Professor McGonagall teaches Ron Weasley to waltz for the Yule Ball.
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5. Hertford Bridge: The Bridge of Sighs
New College Ln, Oxford OX1 3BL
Look up at that elegant covered stone bridge floating between two collegiate buildings over New College Lane: Hertford Bridge, universally known to locals and visitors as the Bridge of Sighs. Completed in nineteen fourteen by architect Sir Thomas Jackson, it links the Old and New quadrangles of Hertford College so students do not have to brave the wet Oxford rain.
Why is it named after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice? While visitors frequently compare it to the Venetian Ponte dei Sospiri, architects note that its graceful single span actually resembles the Rialto Bridge far more closely. Oxford undergraduates quickly invented their own humorous explanation for the sighs: they claimed it was the heavy sigh of students walking across the bridge to face their dreaded end-of-term examinations and tutors.
A popular Oxford myth claims that decades ago, college authorities conducted a survey of student health, discovered that Hertford students were the heaviest in the university, and sealed the bridge doors to force them to take the stairs for exercise! Of course, the doors were never locked, but the tale remains an undergraduate favorite.
Stand underneath the arch on a foggy winter evening: with the gas lamps glowing against the honey-colored Cotswold limestone, New College Lane feels like a film set frozen in the seventeenth century, untouched by modern neon.
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6. New College Cloisters: The Malfoy Ferret Courtyard
Holywell St, Oxford OX1 3BN
Step into the cool stone passageways of New College Cloisters and look through the arched tracery at that enormous gnarled holm oak tree dominating the central courtyard. Despite its name, New College was founded in thirteen seventy-nine by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, making its tranquil quadrangle and cloisters well over six hundred years old.
Do you recognize that sprawling oak tree from the cinema? In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, this exact courtyard was the setting for one of the most celebrated scenes in the series. Draco Malfoy sat perched arrogantly on a branch of this very oak taunting Harry about the Triwizard Tournament.
As Malfoy attempts to cast a spell behind Harry's back, Professor Alastor Mad-Eye Moody, secretly Barty Crouch Junior, points his staff and shouts: I will teach you to curse someone when their back is turned! With a flash of magic, he transforms the terrified Malfoy into a squealing white ferret and bounces him merrily up and down across these stone flagstones.
Beyond movie magic, these quiet cloisters preserve the medieval heart of the college. The cloisters were originally used for monastic processions, and in sixteen forty-two, King Charles the First used them to store gunpowder and military uniforms during the English Civil War. Today, shaded by the ancient oak, they remain an untouched oasis of peace.
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7. The Eagle and Child & Lamb and Flag: The Inklings' Living Room
49 St Giles', Oxford OX1 3LU
Stand before the black-and-white timber facade of The Eagle and Child on St Giles, known affectionately to generations of locals as the Bird and Baby. Dating back to the seventeenth century, this pub is the sacred birthplace of modern twentieth-century fantasy literature.
Who met here every Tuesday morning for nearly sixteen years? Between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-nine, an informal literary discussion club called the Inklings gathered around the coal fireplace in a small private back lounge called the Rabbit Room. Its central figures were C.S. Lewis, fellow of Magdalen College, and J.R.R. Tolkien, fellow of Pembroke and Merton.
Pints of bitter in hand, pipes puffing aromatic tobacco smoke, they pulled handwritten manuscripts from their coat pockets and read them aloud for fierce constructive critique. It was here that C.S. Lewis first read aloud drafts of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Screwtape Letters. In this very room, Tolkien read aloud the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, testing the names of Hobbits, Elves, and the terror of the Nazgûl on his academic friends.
Directly across St Giles sits the Lamb and Flag, another historic seventeenth-century pub where the Inklings moved when the Rabbit Room became too noisy. Thomas Hardy also wrote Jude the Obscure in its snug. As the evening bells of St Giles ring out across the street, you are standing at the very hearth where Narnia and Middle-earth were first spoken into existence.