Oxford

Gargoyles watch from every cornice and pinnacle, their stone eyes tracking a skyline so dense with spires and domes that Matthew Arnold's phrase — the city of dreaming spires — has never been improved upon. Oxford is the oldest university city in the English-speaking world, and every quad, library and chapel is still in use.

Oxford's university, teaching since the twelfth century, spreads thirty-nine architecturally distinct colleges across the city centre, many open to visitors. The Bodleian Library has claimed a copy of every book published in England for over four centuries — thirteen million items beneath medieval stone, with the fan-vaulted fifteenth-century Divinity School the finest ceiling in the city. Christ Church, grandest of the colleges, doubles as the cathedral where evensong is sung free to all comers, in the college where Lewis Carroll dreamed up Alice — and whose hall inspired Hogwarts'. The Ashmolean, the world's first purpose-built public museum, spans eight millennia; the Pitt Rivers behind the Natural History Museum crams half a million objects into Victorian cases barely changed since 1884; and punts slide up the Cherwell past the oldest botanic garden in Britain, founded 1621. The covered market has traded pies, cheese and college scarves since 1774.