Oxford, drawn from its own streets.

Oxford on paper

The Thames comes down the western side of the frame and the Cherwell down the eastern, and they meet below the city — so Oxford prints as a place on an island of dry ground with water on three sides of its centre. The meadows fill the gaps: Port Meadow spreads across the north-west as a large pale shape with no streets at all, Christ Church Meadow does the same immediately south of the colleges, and the two of them squeeze the built city into a surprisingly narrow band.

Inside that band the colleges read as walled blocks. Each is a perimeter of building with quads and gardens inside it, so on the map they appear as compact enclosures the streets bend around rather than pass through, arranged along a spine that crosses at the central junction. Nothing else in England prints quite like it; the nearest thing is Cambridge, and even there the pattern is looser.

Outside the walls the grain changes quickly. Jericho's terraces are tight and regular beside the canal, which arrives from the north as a straight deliberate line and stops abruptly where the basin used to be. Summertown's avenues run north, Cowley's streets spread east beyond the Cherwell around the works, and the ring road holds everything at the edges of a wider frame. Six kilometres across holds the rivers, the meadows, the colleges and the inner suburbs together.