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Oxford has been producing ideas, arguments, and world leaders since the first lectures were held here around 1096. The city's medieval core is a dense tangle of golden limestone colleges, each one its own small kingdom of quadrangles, chapels, and dining halls where scholars have been arguing about everything from theology to quantum physics for nearly a thousand years. Walk along the High Street at dusk, when the Radcliffe Camera's dome glows warm against a grey sky, and it is easy to understand why so many people who come here for three years never quite manage to leave.

Beyond the colleges, Oxford is a proper working city of half a million people, with Covered Market stalls selling everything from cheese to bootlaces since 1774, and the Bodleian Library quietly hoarding over 13 million books in a warren of underground tunnels.

The Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street houses one of Britain's finest collections of art and antiquities, and the Pitt Rivers Museum crams anthropological curiosities into every inch of Victorian display cases. Punt down the Cherwell on a summer afternoon, duck into Blackwell's bookshop on Broad Street, and you will understand why Oxford has been making its visitors slightly envious since the Middle Ages.