Save to List: Jimin Kang's Oxford
A world’s worth of recommended spots from our global community
words – jimin kang
location – oxford, england
There are many things to be said about Oxford – much of which has likely been said, if not written, before, by the 13 Centuries’ worth of scholars, scientists, writers, priests, musicians, teachers, drivers, waiters and the endless assortment of others who have called the city their home. In 2021, I arrived in the city knowing little about the place other than its reputation as home to one of the oldest universities in the world. I soon discovered it was much more eccentric than that.
Three years later, as a graduate who’s chosen to stay, I find myself straddling the fine line between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ in a manner that helps me see the city in varied ways. It helps, too, that I’m here in part to finish my contribution to an ever-growing collection of ‘Oxford novels.’ These are narratives set in the city that, in some way, converse with its many recurring themes: the life of the mind; socioeconomic divides; the merits and pitfalls of cosmopolitanism, transience, faith, and how ordinary people come together to do extraordinary things.
Something else that keeps me here are the reasons for why Oxford is known as the ‘city of dreaming spires’: it’s the kind of place where dreams and ordinary life often coincide. Despite its haughty traditions, it is also a prefigurative place, an incubator for ideas and thoughts that bleed beyond the borders of the small city into the bigger world and the complex discussions of development at play, as some of these places represent.
01_Common Ground
A co-working café, social enterprise and home to comedy nights, clothing swaps and a new second-hand bookstore [Curio Books]. I’ve enjoyed going to Common Ground on Oxford’s beloved Little Clarendon Street to spend long, coffee-fueled hours working. Go for a coffee [or locally made pastry], stay for the music –and peruse the posters on the walls for upcoming activities or local language conversation partners.
02_Tap Social
Since 2016, Tap Social has provided over 85,000 hours of paid employment to prisoners and prison leavers in their brewery, bakery and pub collective across Oxford. Some of my favourite Summer days have involved a long bike ride along the River Thames to the Proof Bakehouse, where I’ve shared cinnamon buns and cheese-marmite Danishes with friends. In the evenings, I’d go dancing at the original Taproom along Botley Road, a place where – as one visitor wrote online and I can confirm to be true – you might find ‘grannies to your left and goths to your right,’ all having a good time!
03_Ultimate Picture Palace
Of Oxford’s various cinemas, the Ultimate Picture Palace on Jeune St – which plays a mix of new and old, independent and mainstream films – sports the distinction of being not only the oldest, but the only one that is entirely community-owned. In 2022, over 1,200 local investors bought shares in the cinema to keep it running; governance decisions are made by shareholder members, many of whom [including some friends of mine] volunteer in the ticket office and the bar.
04_Port Meadow
In the 11th Century, King Alfred granted the Freemen of Oxford 120 hectares of land in which their animals could graze freely as a reward for defending Oxford against the Danes’ attempts to overtake the city. Today, this stretch of common land – called Port Meadow – remains a protected area in which one can find grazing cattle, native ponies and wildfowl and waders that gather around the flooded plains in the Winter. I often go here to run, wander and, in the Summer, sit in beloved beer gardens at independent pubs like The Medley and The Perch.
05_Oxfam Bookshop[s]
Oxford being the city it is, its second-hand bookstores are filled with an eclectic assortment of books. In the window of the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles Street – the first in the world – on one Saturday morning, I saw books on European bird hunting, Biblical themes in Mughal paintings and queer histories in London. Founded in 1942 in Oxford, Oxfam [originally known as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief] works to support community partners in the areas of gender equality, climate change mitigation and poverty relief around the world.
06_Quaker Meeting House
Just north of the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles Street is a bright red door labelled ‘43’: this is the entrance to Oxford’s Quaker Meeting House, where, on four days a week, local Quakers and visitors sit in silent waiting. During my time at Oxford, I’ve come to find a home in this theologically diverse community, whose worship style emphasises the values of individual experience, whose decision-making mechanisms encourage close listening and whose building is often shared with mental health charities, student activist groups, labour unions and those seeking some quiet in the garden.
07_Old Fire Station
Calling itself a ‘centre of creativity’ in Oxford, the Old Fire Station – close to the beloved international food market, Gloucester Green – houses both the homelessness charity Crisis and the Arts at the Old Fire Station [AOFS]. Here you can attend classes, shows or book rooms to rehearse in; joining a friend for lunch one afternoon at the OFS’s Damascus Rose Kitchen, I was taken by the welcoming airiness of the space and the option at the counter to ‘pay it forward.’
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