Oxford Film Locations by Phoebe Taplin

Author:Phoebe Taplin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

Exeter College was the model for Jordan College in The Golden Compass

Carfax, St Aldate’s, Oriel Square, Merton Street, Christ Church Meadows

Start at Carfax crossroads, Oxford’s ancient heart. You can get another bird’s eye view of the city and along the busy High Street by climbing the narrow spiral staircase of 12th-century Carfax Tower. Ken Loach, known for his socially engaged films from Kes in the 1960s to I, Daniel Blake (2016), studied Law at St Peter’s College in nearby New Inn Hall Street.

Walk down St Aldate’s. The Victorian interior of Oxford Town Hall (tours only, £4.50) doubled as the inside of the Old Bailey in A Fish Called Wanda (1988). It also became the ‘Ethical Hall’, where Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters (Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham-Carter) hear a lecture and Helen picks up the wrong umbrella in Howards End (1992). Inside the town hall, you’ll also find the Oxford Museum.

Turn left down Blue Boar Street to reach the Bear Inn (open from 11am). This pub, one of the city’s oldest, has a collection of nearly 5000 snipped-off ties. In Colin Dexter’s novel Death is Now my Neighbour, Inspector Morse asks the landlord for help identifying a tie, which had become a crucial clue. Keep on into Bear Lane to reach several lovely colleges.

Hugh Grant made his screen debut at Oriel College in a student film called Privileged (1982). Oriel, which also makes several appearances in Inspector Morse and Lewis, is the college where Nick (Rob Lowe) is supposed to be studying in Oxford Blues (1984) and features in the rowing film True Blue (1996) with Dominic West, Tom Hollander and others. The street outside was one of several Oxford locations for Quills (2000), a film about the Marquis de Sade, starring Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet.

Nearby, with gold pelicans topping its drainpipes and a distinctive column in the courtyard, Corpus Christi is the college Dakin (Dominic Cooper) visits in The History Boys (2006), finding out that Irwin was never a student there. The montage of Oxford shots at the start of the TV adaptation of Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Nights (1987) follows the sound of organ music into Corpus chapel. The story is set in a fictional all-female college called Shrewsbury, based on Sayers’ old college, Somerville.

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