You can sleep over at Oxford’s colleges

None of this would satisfy someone expecting hotel luxuries. There’s no room service, no minibar and no fine cotton pillows. But you want to get a glimpse of Oxford student life, the room is perfect. And at £115 (US$156) – less than half the rate of most central hotels – it also represents great value.

Over two days, I explore the college fully. I find an old wooden door that opens with a hefty push and a loud creak to reveal a spectacular ornate chapel built when Thomas Cromwell ruled England. The chapel’s vaulted wood-and-plaster ceiling, Georgian chandeliers and delicate Victorian stained glass seem all the more impressive because there is no one else there. Apart from a few postgraduates and professors occasionally passing, clutching piles of books, it feels as though I have the college to myself. When I was a student, I rushed around like them, worrying about my next essay but failing to appreciate my magical surroundings. As a visitor, I finally have time to linger.

Alamy

Many colleges serve breakfast in their dining halls. At New College, guests dine in its medieval hall, the oldest in either Oxford or Cambridge; while Christ Church College’s Tudor Great Hall serves continental or cooked breakfasts in a vast refectory that inspired Harry Potter’s Hogwarts’ Great Hall. Sadly, Brasenose’s breakfasts were temporarily unavailable during my stay, but peeping into the dining hall revealed another wood-panelled treasure that sparked memories of cheap fry-ups eaten under oil paintings in Queen’s College.

I appreciate the college seclusion far more than I ever did as a teenager; back then, I just wondered why there weren’t late night bars and rock bands jamming. The strict privacy isn’t about snobbery; it’s about protection. Oxford has educated 12 kings, 47 Nobel Prize winners, 25 British prime ministers, 28 foreign presidents and prime ministers, seven saints and one pope. Seven of the last 11 British prime ministers have been Oxford graduates.