You can sleep over at Oxford's colleges - here's what it's really like

During university holidays, visitors can stay overnight inside Oxford University's historic colleges. A former student returns to see what access to this hidden world really feels like.

College bells toll. A flock of starlings flutter off into the darkness and I am alone in a quiet square of ancient Gothic buildings. The city-centre bustle is just a few yards away, muffled behind Oxford's famous towers, turrets and ornamental spires. It's misty early evening in one of the university's medieval quadrangles and I am settling into my room for the night. 

I'm buzzing after strolling through the grand stone archways of a college gatehouse as if I belong there. The entrance was built just after the War of the Roses in the reign of Henry VII, and I've got special access.

During university holidays, which stretch for 28 weeks – more than half the year, thanks to Oxford's short, eight-week terms – many of the 39 colleges are increasingly opening student rooms to overnight guests. The basic bed-and-breakfast accommodation ranges from modern blocks and converted Victorian townhouses to, best of all, rooms set with the ancient squares, called "quads".

These enclosed academic cloisters are normally hidden behind imposing college walls, and staying inside them offers a glimpse of Oxford student life that guided tours or open-top buses can never reach.

Richard Wakefield

I'm staying in Brasenose. Founded in 1509 by a Privy Councillor and the Bishop of Lincoln, it is one of the prettiest and most central Oxford colleges. With my private student key card, I can open its huge wooden gates and explore deserted cobbled courtyards, private gardens and facades encrusted with carvings and gargoyles. And I have my own rooms, on Staircase One in the Old Quad.

Guests can wander through college gardens at dawn, eat breakfast beneath gilded oil portraits in wood-panelled dining rooms, explore reading rooms tucked into hidden quads, spot carved faces spouting water into gurgling stone channels and climb narrow winding staircases to atmospheric libraries dating back hundreds of years.

I find excuses to come and go throughout the day, entering Brasenose though its gate that opens right onto Oxford's historic High Street or emerging alongside the iconic Radcliffe Camera part of the central Bodleian Library complex. It's a strange thrill to feel the eyes of other tourists on me. Perhaps they think I am a student – or, at my age, even a professor.

Stepping through the college gates triggers memories. Half a lifetime ago, I actually was an Oxford student. I arrived here as a country-bumpkin undergraduate at Queen's College, next door to Brasenose, wide-eyed at this strange environment of single-sex, gown-wearing aristocratic entitlement. Always feeling an outsider, my time as a student wasn't entirely happy. Returning as a B&B guest allows me to revisit the past.

Alamy/ David Fisher

But experiences I hardly noticed as a worried student become joys as now that I am a visitor. The college porter's lodge is still an Oxford institution, with uniformed porters providing security, information and support for students. I remembered how the Queen's College porters felt like part of my family, sorting my mail, passing on messages and checking that a clueless teenager far from home was coping. Today they greet me as a visitor, giving me more local tips than a top hotel concierge.

More like this:

• Eight of the world's most extraordinary tiny hotel rooms

• The most anticipated hotel openings of 2026

• Can hotels solve the summer childcare crunch?

Oxford's dreaming spires have always been magical from the outside – but beneath them, the Middle-Earth world of arcane colleges, mysterious traditions and ancient privacies is notoriously difficult to penetrate.

There's no central campus. Oxford's academic and religious institutions have evolved since the 13th Century into proudly separate, wealthy and fiercely independent colleges spread across the city. Each has its own high stone walls and imposing gates, enclosing private mini kingdoms of gardens, dining halls, chapels, libraries and historic student rooms. They have their own unpredictable rules and opening times too. Tourists soon get used to seeing "closed to visitors" signs at college gates, getting only a tantalising glimpse of ivy-covered quads covered with ancient carvings before being ushered away by the porters.

That's why it's such a treat to stay within a college: it isn't just affordable and convenient; it's a passport into Oxford's protected inner world.

Brasenose College

My room looks out onto a creeper-covered rectangle of buildings punctuated by a giant ornate wall-mounted sundial from 1719. Reaching it involves passing through yet another stone archway and a strange sequence of locked wooden doors.

Inside is a giant wooden ceiling beam, uneven floorboards, painted-over cupboard doors in the walls and a squeaky double bed. Beyond the bedroom lies a long, narrow, empty room of uncertain purpose – an architectural oddity typical of Oxford. The ensuite shower works well enough, though its low, sloping ceiling forces me to stoop, and the curtain must be drawn as it faces directly onto Brasenose Lane, busy with people on bicycles.

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.

Today's students include the wealthy, the powerful and the intensely private. Colleges prioritise their security over the rights of tourists to wander freely snapping selfies. As I left Brasenose and closed the imposing gate for the last time, I conceded that that's what makes the experience of staying inside their walls feel all the more special.

--

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. 

For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebookand Instagram.