Oxford

Guided tours of the library's oldest rooms run 30 minutes from £12.50 and 60 minutes from £17.50. If you only want the Divinity School, the fifteenth-century vaulted teaching room, a self-guided look costs £3.

The biggest college, with a cathedral inside it and the hall the Harry Potter set was based on. Self-guided multimedia visits release tickets every Friday and you should book online to guarantee entry rather than turning up.

Britain's first public museum, founded 1683. Free, open daily 10.00-17.00 with last entry at 16.45, and it runs from Egyptian mummies to Pissarro without a gap.

The domed reading room is the picture everyone takes. You cannot go inside on a normal ticket, but the quad around it is open and free to walk into.

Hire from Magdalen Bridge or the Cherwell Boathouse and pole upstream. You stand on the flat end, everyone falls in occasionally, and it is much harder than it looks.

Frequent direct GWR services into Oxford station, ten minutes' walk west of the centre. Chiltern Railways also runs from London Marylebone, slower but often cheaper.

The Oxford-London coach services go round the clock, take longer than the train and cost a fraction of a walk-up rail fare.

Everything worth seeing sits inside a square kilometre. Driving in is deliberately difficult; use the Park & Ride sites on the ring road.

May and June: exam season, punts on the Cherwell, and the colleges at their best before the students go home.

January and February. Cold, cheap and the least competition for a place in a college or a pub.

July and August, when the colleges swap students for language schools and the High Street fills with coach parties.

Ashmolean when it opens at ten, free, and give it the two hours before the coaches reach the High Street.

Bodleian tour, or £3 for the Divinity School on your own, then the Radcliffe Camera quad.

The Covered Market, which has been trading since 1774 and still feeds students rather than tourists.

Christ Church with a pre-booked ticket, then out into Christ Church Meadow to the river.

A punt at Magdalen Bridge while the light lasts, then the Turf Tavern, which takes finding down an alley.

Eight miles north at Woodstock: a baroque palace, a Capability Brown park and Churchill's birthplace. Hanborough station or a direct bus from Oxford.

Charlbury and Kingham are half an hour up the line, and put you on the eastern edge of the limestone villages without needing a car from London.