fascinating place oxfordshire. a long flat plain just north of the north downs with a genuinely ancient city just before you get up to the cotswolds. a clean division between the northern half and the southern half. the centre of oxford itself is a kind of entrepot of the english and increasingly global elite, where they rock up for a few years like backpackers in chaing mai before disappearing, maybe they've made a mate or two with the locals but mostly they've hung out with each other. all the old buildings look like they were designed for children - people say that the architecture is beautiful but to me it looks like a toy town. something about the buildings looks like its designed to appeal to the imaginations of 17 year olds, bits that look like castles, bits that look like ramparts. uniform yellow stone dug out of the ground by the locals. then that part is literally divided by a river and a bridge, which is almost taking the piss symbolism-wise, from the ex-industrial housing sprawl of east oxford which is about three times as big as the university bit of the city.
then the countryside is a mixture of abandoned US airbases that have been turned into housing estates, old farming villages, university boathouses proliferating outwards along the river, and truly cursed market towns. the locals with west country accents are slowly getting pushed out towards swindon and wycombe by new money, people coming in with new ways of speaking and an insatiable demand for lattes, cappucinos, flat whites.
