Today Holywell Street is a pleasant, quiet street of 17th century houses.
Like Broad Street, it was established as the result of expansion of the city after the Black Death, built on open ground outside the city walls.
On the left of Holywell Strret, although it looks like a converted chapel, Holywell music room is the first building designed specifically for musical performances.
It was built in 1742-8, and restored in 1959.
Bath Place, on the right, is a narrow winding lane which leads to the city walls, the Turf tavern, and eventually New College lane.
The public entrance to the college is from New College lane, so here the college is covered in the second walk
The church was built around 1160. It is not normally open to the public, but the churchyard is accessible, and contains graves of Kenneth Graham and Kenneth Tynan.
Keneth Tynan (1927-1980) was born in Birmingham, studied English at Magdalen, and became a controversial and influential theatre critic. He championed John Osborne, and achieved notoriety with the nudity in his revue "Oh Calcutta".
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was born in Edinburgh, and was brought up by relatives because of his fathers alcoholism.
When he was five his mother died of scarlet fever, and he almost died as well. He moved to live with his grandmother in Cookham, and went to school in Oxford. He yearned to attend Oxford university, but there was no money to support him, so he joined the Bank of England in 1879, where he was promoted rapidly.
In 1899 he married Elspeth Thomson, but it proved an unhappy match. "The Wind in the Willows" was published in 1908, after being developed in the form of bedtime stories and letters to his son Alistair. It is based on an idealised form of the Thames near Cookham.
Alistair went to Oxford, but committed suicide by jumping under a train while there.
"The Wind in the Willows" became a classic.
The tower has a sundial.
In 1936 Dorothy L Sayers used the church as the setting for the marriage of her hero, Lord Peter Winsey, and Harriet Vane in Busman's Honeymoon
Returning to the end of Holywell Street, at its corner with Longwall street is a brick garage, now converted into flats.
This where Morris built the prototype "Bull-nose Morris".
Production was subsequently carried out at Cowley.
Morris ran the manufacturing business while a colleague ran the garage.
Later the colleague started to build sports cars, still using the name "Morris Garage's (MG).
Magdalen was founded in 1458, by Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, on land outside the city walls.
It follows the model established by New College, but in more extensive grounds, which include a deer park.
The walls went up in 1467, most of the buildings between 1474 and 1480.
The bell tower was constructed in 1492. Choristers sing from the top of the tower at 6 am every May 1st.
Opposite Magdalen college is the Botanic Garden.
The garden was founded, as the "Physic garden" in 1621 on the site of the jewish cemetery.
The first gardener was Jacob Bobart, whose son (also Jacob Bobart) became professor of botany.
Near the Lily pond is a yew tree planted by the elder Jacob Bobart.
| There is a remarkable description of the younger Jacob and his wife in an Oxford guidebook dated 1720: |
| "I was greatly shocked by the hideous features and generally villainous appearance of this good and honest man. His wife, a filthy old hag, was with him, and although she may be the ugliest of her sex he is certainly the more repulsive of the two. An unusually pointed and very long nose, little eyes set deep in the head, a twisted mouth almost without upper lip, a great deep scar in one cheek, and the whole face and hands bloack and coarse as those of the poorest gardener or farm labourer. His clothing and especially his hat were also very bad. Such is the aspect of the professor who would most naturally be taken for the gardener" |
There are three classical arches in the garden, built by Nicholas Stone. This is one of the smaller ones. The largest, at the entrance, contains statues of Charles I, Charles II, and Stone himself (or the Earl of Danby who founded the garden).
Outside the garden is a rose garden and small monument commemorating the production of pennicillin in Oxford.
Alexander Fleming had discovered a mould that killed bacteria, and as the second world war broke out, a team at Oxford, led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, began to try an isolate and purify penicillin. The results were tested on an Oxford policeman, and were shown to work, although insufficent had beenprepared to cure the man, and he died. Subsequently mass production transferred to America, and sufficient was produced in time for the Normandy landings. Fleming, Florey and Chain won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1945.
Beyond the rose garden, we turn left into Rose Lane, which leads to Deadmans Walk .
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