Free Excursion Oxford
09:00 AM to 12:00 PM Explore Oxford through – Oxford City Sightseeing (Open-top Bus) Your Ticket for Oxford City Sightseeing (Open-top Bus) is valid for 24 hrs on both Guide Friday GREEN and City Sightseeing RED buses and you can get on and off at any of the 19 stops on the tour – keep a hold of your ticket for re-boarding!
12:00 PM – 02:00 PM Networking Lunch Your networking lunch is provided at Vaults & Garden Cafe, University Church, High Street, Oxford OX1 4AH Phone: 01865 279 112. You will find Vaults & Garden Café in the historic and contemporary heart of Oxford, situated in the 1* listed Old Congregation house of Oxford University, which was built in 1320, with the Old University Library above and the University Church Gardens on Radcliffe Square.
02:00 PM – 15:30 PM: Oxford Literary Walking Tour (90mins) Departing at 2:00 from: the blue gates of Trinity College on Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BH Description of the Oxford Literary Walking Tour: Oxford’s magic has inspired generations of creative writers, some of them internationally famous, like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, others are known to a more restricted but discerning readership, like Philip Larkin and Beerbohm himself.
Literary walking tour evokes many of these unique personalities and shows you the places where they studied and relaxed, was rapt by religious fervour, composed in mad erotic delirium, or drifted away into dreams of other worlds and other days. Our guides, noted literary experts, will take you around the centre of “that sweet city… with her dreaming spires” as Matthew Arnold phrased it, and give you a genuine flavour of Oxford’s glorious literary past, and her vibrant present. Colleges will be visited so that the living atmosphere of the university, jealously preserved through long centuries, can be experienced just as it was by the writers themselves.
The tour lasts for an hour and a half, giving plenty of time to wander and savour the delights of the ‘English Athens’: its halls, chapels, cloisters, and gardens which, as W.H. Auden expressed it, the rooks still haunt “like agile babies.” The whole history of the English language can be traced in these ancient places, right up to the 21st century of dynamic change, and the resonant names of Shelley, Swift, Wilde, T.E. Lawrence, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Waugh, Amis, Philip Pullman and Le Carre will come to assume greater significance and fascination, even for those who know their work well. For those who do not, a whole new world of knowledge and imagination awaits discovery.
15:30 AM to 05:00 PM Explore Oxford through Oxford City Sightseeing (Open-top Bus) Your Ticket for Oxford City Sightseeing (Open-top Bus) is valid for 24 hrs on both Guide Friday GREEN and City Sightseeing RED buses and you can get on and off at any of the 19 stops on the tour – keep a hold of your ticket for re-boarding!