South East England 2025

We left Perth early evening on the direct QF 9 to London which was nice and smooth. It was long too but we got to watch quite a few movies. We got to Heathrow about 30 min early (after slowing down, otherwise it would have been one hour!). We landed at 4:30AM, then had to wait to get the rental car as Europcar only opened at 6AM. But this meant that we had to focus on staying awake for the day ahead of us, which definitely helped with jet lag.

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Nutfield Priory Hotel in Surrey is a nice place to stay or just to have tea and admire the old, majestic rooms and furniture. I particularly liked the gum boot display at the entrance, possibly ready to be used by their potential room guests.

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At Nuttfield Priory farm shop they sell lots of nice things including stuff from Diddly Squat Farm.

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Sheffield Park had beautiful autumn colours on and it was very relaxing to walk through even in the rain.

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Windsor Castle was spectacular at some point in its life. When we visted, there were quite a few homeless people sleeping around it, and up to the gates. We thought of Windsor as a British icon, but despite that there weren’t that many English restaurants around, and not even the traditional Red-phone-booth and Paddington-bear containing souvenir shops. It was very noisy as well, with planes that were going to land at Heathrow flying quite low above it pretty much every couple of minutes. Inside, there were interesting artefacts but not only outdated, also old and poorly maintained. Queen Mary’s doll house was the most interesting thing and we also got to see Queen Elizabeth II’s tomb in the chapel (but weren’t allowed to take any photos). I hope they polished the silver and dusted the furniture for their American guests a couple of weeks later.

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We stopped in Great Missenden to visit Roald Dahl’s museum but it was closed, so we had a baguette and a cup of tea at Kissa cafe (that had just closed but reopened for us) and then got going again.

In Oxford we stayed at Newton House, just on the outskirts of the energy efficiency zone, which was quite handy as it had parking in a city where to the centre is limited to bikes and public transport vehicles.

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We walked past lots of beautiful old buildings, across Folly Bridge and past the Head of the River pub every day during our stay.

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We noticed quite a few people living in their boats on the river in conditions that did not seem very flash. The River is Thames, the same one that eventually reaches London.

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We visited Weston Library where they had an interesting exhibition about treasures, their meanings and how they are different across cultures.

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The Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library, is the focal point of the University of Oxford, but it is not open to the public, it can only be seen from the outside.

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The Sheldonian Theatre is where the graduation ceremonies are held and it can be visited outside these times.

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Most colleges can only be seen from the outside and are not open to tourists.

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The conference lectures were in the Examination schools with their grandiose, sombrely decorated rooms.

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Luckily we were able to visit the Bodleian library which is one of the oldest in Europe. It dates back to 1488, when it started with about 30 books, and this increased to about 200 volumes a few years later, donated by Duke Humfrey. The books were initially stored horizontal on desks and were chained down to prevent them being stolen. Many of them were Catholic books, so they were destroyed during the Reformation. The concept of book shelves was only introduced in the late 1600s and the books were initially stored with the fore-edge facing the room to accommodate the chains (and a number that linked each tome to a catalogue).

The library was damaged by fire a couple of times and even today, when entering Duke Humfrey’s Library, an oath still has to be taken not to bring anything that could kindle a fire.

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We also visited the Divinity School, where students used to debate their exams in front of an audience. It was what the name suggests since religion was the main subject studied back in those days;

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the Convocation House is where the English government retreated during the Great Plague in 1665; and the Chancellor’s Court is where university members and students used to be tried allegedly to avoid lenience by civil courts but the punishments were often much milder. This is where Oscar Wilde was tried for debt and found guilty.

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The tour of Christ Church College & Cathedral was quite informative. We learned about the colleges and university structure. Christ Church College is one of the oldest colleges, set up during the reign of Henry VIII by his Catholic Cardinal Woley, and was initially named Cardinal College. It was taken over by the king once the cardinal got disgraced. Tom’s Square was cleared to be the biggest square, with Great Tom Bell housed in Tom Tower above Tom Gate.

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They only accepted their first female student in the 1980s. We learned that Cambridge University was setup in the 1200s, when a group of Oxford academics left due to disagreement and ongoing conflict with the town people. Teaching was happening in Oxford in 1096 but was limited and mainly on religious topics. This changed and the number of students increased in 1200s when Henry II banned English students from studying in France after his quarrel with Thomas Beckett. We also found out some trivia – like the fact that Oxford time is 5 min past GMT because academics at the time did not agree with the government when they introduced time zones / median times in the 19th century. Christ Church College remains a royal property and stronghold and there is a chair inside the chapel where King Charles I sat and no other royal has sat there since due to superstition about losing their head (literally).

Many of the Harry Potter movies were filmed around Christ Church College and if you’re a fan there are special tours following the location of each movie.

Einstein delivered lectures here in 1931 in German and nobody understood a thing as they hadn’t thought that English might not be his language! Queen Elizabeth I used to come here and debate with academics even though she would have never been accepted as a student. There is a shelf housing a sculpture of the current king or queen and which is empty at the moment. They expect / hope that King Charles III will visit them soon and unveil his.

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The Cathedral is quite interesting to visit. Its ceiling originally had colour paintings, but this changed during / after Reformation. The Thomas Beckett window depicts his murder by the French knights, but the window was likely moved around and Beckett’s head was changed to normal glass (painted brown in 1980s) during Reformation, at the same time when many of the Catholic statues were decapited. St Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford, has a shrine and an window in which one of the scenes includes a toilet seat since the stained glass was done by a young painter the same year that Thomas Crapper invented the toilet, so it must have been “the talk of the town”.

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, was a professor of mathematics at Oxford and his Alice in Wonderland stories came to life while he was looking after Dean Henry Liddell’s daughter, Alice. There is a real door in the courtyard of Christ Church College that inspired the one that Alice went through in her magical journey.

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The Mini factory is in Oxford and they organise some very interesting tours – no photos allowed inside the factory, only in the museum.

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We visited New College (new in 1379 when it opened…). We walked around the grounds, saw the tree that features in Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire which was filmed here. The gardens are perfect to relax and immerse in nature, and there is an Aztec pyramid-like mound in the middle (for which there are two possible explanations – since it was constructed in the early 1640s, around the time of the English Civil War, some think it was intended as a symbolic viewpoint for the Royalist cause; another possible symbolism is that it might have been intended as a “Mount Parnassus”, a reference to the home of the Muses in Greek mythology).

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The Chapel of Harris Manchester College is small but interesting, featuring a lot of wood on the ceilings and walls as well, and has an interestingly painted organ. This is the only section of Harris Manchester College that is open to visitors.

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We visited the Science Museum to see Einstein’s black board but also other interesting pieces around the history of science, including how many protests there were when the typhoid vaccine was introduced. The anti-vaccination League is not something new either.

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As we left Oxford, we drove past Sir James Murray’s Post Box at 78 Banbury Rd, Oxford. It was installed by the Royal Mail outside his house in 1885 to cope with the vast amount of correspondence he was sending as he compiled the Oxford English Dictionary.

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We spent two days around the Cotswolds – not enough, we’d definitely have to come back.

We started with Bourton-on-the-Water. The village is really pretty – it straddles the river Windrush, has low stone bridges and traditional stone houses with colourful little shops.

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We then drove through Slaughter Upper and then Lower which were even smaller and very pretty; Stow-on-the-world is also nice, and Moreton-in-Marsh was our next stop for a short sightseeing walk.

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Next we went to Bourton-on-the-hill, Chipping Campden with its stone cottages and an old church, St James Church, where an old lady and her dog had volunteered to be there while tourists were visiting. We had an icecream here, visited some shops, then continued our journey.

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We drove through Snowshill, Broadway, Stanton, Stanway and we stopped in Winchcombe where we went to see Hailes Abbey, which was destroyed when Henry VIII ordered all Catholic monasteries to be disbanded; there is a Church next to it which survived, as it was a parish church.

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There are lots of Neolithic sites around this part of England. We went to see Bellas Knap Long Barrow, a Neolithic burial site. The walk to get there is quite scenic as well, offering beautiful views towards the surrounding countryside.

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We went to Jeremy Clarkson’s farm shop, Diddly Squat Farm, and bought some juices and biltong after about a half an hour wait to get in. We drove through Chipping Norton and intended to have dinner at his Farmer’s Dog pub but changed our mind when we saw how busy the carpark was.

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Burford is a historic market town that is right on the main road between Oxford and Cheltenham (or the West Country, as that part of England used to be called). We went for a stroll along Sheep Street, to see some beautiful cottages and gardens.

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We left the Costwolds with the promise to ourselves to come back another time and wander around these villages that seem lost in time. There is a short video with bits of our drive here.

Next destination was Cheltenham, where King George III allegedly used to come to drink its medicinal waters. It is quite a big town with (of course) Georgian-style buildings. We just drove through, didn’t stop.

Painswick was our next stop – a former wool town with nice rococo gardens that we strolled through.