Oxford, a city of doors

Oxford is a city of doors. Big doors, tiny doors, doors within doors. There are grand fortified gateways to colleges built to keep the townsfolk out, and plain doors with bars once used to lock them in. Some are adorned with coats of arms, faces and foliage carved into the stone surrounds. Others have fantastical door knockers. There are freshly painted doors in bright colours, and those that look battered and uncared for, worn with time and much use. Named or numbered, solid oak or moulded metal, with rounded or square lintels, gothic, classical or just plain square they are the thresholds over which multiple generations have stepped. 

I find them all endlessly fascinating.

When I was a child there was an alleyway through which we had to walk to reach the river. On one side was an old churchyard, the heavy overhanging boughs of the ancient yew trees casting a darkness even on the sunniest of days. On the other was a stone wall in which were two gates. Though we never saw them opened, one was so tall we felt it could only be the entrance to the house of a fearsome giant. The other was barely a metre high and painted black, made by a wizened old witch on a broomstick as the entry point to her lair. Or so we believed as we ran as quickly as we could to reach the sunlight beyond. 

That imaginative response to a closed door, the idea of mystery, of possibilities played out behind the openings has stayed with me over the years. Occasionally on my weekly wanderings around the city I will pass a gate set into a rubble stone wall through which somebody is just leaving, and I will catch a glimpse of green, for the briefest of moments the promise of a secret garden beyond. Or a bunch of students with appear through a surprise opening in a vast gate, flashing hidden courtyards and turreted towers. But when they are closed which is often, it is up to you to do the imagining. What lies beyond the gate? Why was it made? Who has walked this way? Is it a welcoming door or an escape route? Perhaps it is the threshold to another world, or a portal to a parallel universe? 

And so on this first day of advent, traditionally a time when doors were marked in chalk to count down the days until Christmas, I bring you 24 Oxford doors.  My very own curated Oxford Sausage advent calendar. I like to think that behind that tiny door on Little Clarendon Street a family of mice are busy embroidering festive frocks like the ones in Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’. Or beyond that pale grey door on Merton Street there is a kitchen full of cooks stirring great bowls of candied fruits soaked in brandy in readiness for Christmas. But let your imagination run wild. I leave it to you to decide what stories you hope to find.

Main picture: the magical Norman door of St Ebbe’s Church

Additional photography by John Milnes and Gina Cowen

Number 1

Kybald Twychen – my favourite house name in Oxford, just off Magpie Lane. In the days when colleges had their own pubs, this was the alehouse for Corpus Christi College, and afterwards used as lodgings for its tutors and students. In 1765 an act of Parliament did away with house names and insisted that all new properties had a number and street name ‘for better identification’. I’m glad this house has retained both.

Number 2

The Wren door – fitted into the 15th century Divinity School by Christopher Wren behind which those accepting degrees could dress up in their finery before heading across the way to his 17th century Sheldonian Theatre purpose built for the occasion. You can just see the book sculpture above the entrance, open at a passage in Greek from St Luke’s Gospel in which Christ goes missing as a twelve year old and is found in the synagogue debating passages from the Bible with his elders. Wren was fourteen when he came to Oxford to study and would have used the Divinity School himself as a hall in which to discuss the scriptures.

Number 3

The door of the 13th century church of St Margaret in Binsey. The well in the churchyard is thought to be the site of St Frideswide’s first healing miracle. It is also the basis for Lewis Carroll’s Treacle Well in Alice in Wonderland, treacle being an old English word for healing balm. There is an air of promise in this picture, an oasis of green just visible through the open door.

Number 4

A door on Broad Street with its face in the sun and bedecked with Virginia creeper. Where does it lead?

Number 5

A confident green door

Number 6

Song School at Magdalen College and a gateway to heaven – if you are lucky you might hear the angelic voices of choristers practising.

Number 7

The door to Conduit House on Hinksey Hill. Open only occasionally these days, it once held vast cisterns of fresh water fed by local springs, that were then sent through a series of lead pipes into the city centre.

Number 8

Postmasters’ Hall on Merton Street was where the 17th century Oxford historian Anthony Wood was born and where he spent most of his life holed up in an attic room above writing about the city.

Number 9

A glimpse into Wadham College through the gate within a gate.

Number 10

This floating brick door is surely a portal to a parallel universe.

Number 11

The door to staircase 11 and one of the medieval cottages built when Worcester College was called Gloucester College after the Benedictine order of St Peter in Gloucester. It was originally established as a place to study for thirteen monks back in 1283. Fifteen abbeys eventually sent their monks here, all with distinct housing arrangements. The shields above the doorway denote which abbey the students came from.

Number 12

The gateway to Campion Hall was built by Edwin Lutyens in the 20th century.

Number 13

The tiny door to the mouse house secreted in a hideaway in Little Clarendon Street

Number 14

A festive wreath

Number 15

The door to what was the 15th century chapel of Our Lady at Smithgate on Catte Street, now used as Hertford College middle common room. The carvings above depict the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to the son of God. Mary is on the left and a feathered Angel Gabriel on the right. By some miracle these figures survived the iconoclasm of the Reformation.

No 16

The doors at Hinksey outdoor swimming pool. Like Mr Benn in the adventures written by David McKee, I always hope that when I close the changing room door I will be transported to another place.

Number 17

Doorway in the Old Schools Quadrangle in the Bodleian Library. Students were expected to study the liberal arts which included languages, geometry and arithmatic. The heads are of Bishop Richard Foxe, founder of Corpus Christi College (left) and Thomas Wolsey Lord High Chancellor under Henry 8 and founder of Cardinal College which became Christ Church College (right).

Number 18

Known as the Narnia door, on St Mary’s Passage it is credited as being the inspiration for C.S Lewis’s Mr Tumnus the faun in the children’s classic ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’. The author certainly preached at the church opposite, the University Church of St Mary the Virgin and would have passed this way.

Number 19

A door on Merton Street.

Number 20

A small gothic door in the side of what was the Church of St Peter-in-the-East, and is now the library for St Edmund Hall in Queen’s Lane.

Number 21

Pusey Street. Metal studs were used to protect against sword and axe attacks but also to prevent horses eating the wood. The more elaborate the studs the higher status the place into which the door led.

Number 22

A doorway in New College leading out to the old medieval city wall.

Number 23

Stamford House

Number 24

The door to St Luke’s Chapel, once the church for the Radcliffe Hospital. St Luke was the patron saint of physicians.