Having lived in Oxford for nearly all my life, and often having friends to visit, I always found myself trying to find optimal routes around Oxford to take them to see the main sights when we didn’t have very much time. Despite there being no shortage of guidebooks of Oxford, my experience is that they tended to contain pages and pages of dense information. I generally found them too much to digest, and impractical to read when you actually want the information, i.e when you are on the street looking at something of interest, that’s assuming you know what building you are looking at to be able to look it up. It got me wondering: if I were to make an Oxford guide book, how would I do it?
The most important thing for me was that a guidebook should be very visual, basically following a map, with the interesting information available as you are navigating the city, following a route that will give you a balanced picture of the city in the shortest time. That’s basically the whole philosophy behind what became ‘A Day in Oxford’.
To cater for visitors with varying time restrictions in Oxford, I decided to devise a main route which would cover the ‘must sees’, i.e. the Radcliffe Camera, the Bridge of Sighs, Christ Church etc, but then have three optional walks that you could easily add on to the route if you had more time.
The maps were all drawn using a vector drawing application called Graphic, and OpenStreetMap for the layouts. When I started, I thought I would go for a ‘sketchy’ style, and only draw the key buildings immediately on the route, and I also thought this style wouldn’t be too time consuming. Anyway, turns out I was very wrong. The ‘sketchy’ style was actually harder to make look good, and only having the key buildings made it look unfinished, so I ended up needing to draw pretty much the whole of Oxford in detail 😟. Inevitably, this took forever, but luckily it turned into something I actually rather enjoyed doing. But I’ll never look at the windows and roofs of Oxford the same way!
Below are some selected pages from the guide book:
The guidebook was sold in Oxford, at Blackwells Bookshop, and Boswells, and also on Amazon, but currently it is only available to buy on Amazon Kindle as an eBook, but I do plan on restocking the physical version on Amazon again soon.
