Cambridge or York, which is more walkable?
Jul 14th, 2013, 10:53 PM
#21
Join Date: Apr 2003
Posts: 17,268
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
"The distance/time is not an object for me"
Time obviously is, or you wouldn't be restricting yourself to a same-day trip. AS I've already said, train fares to York are so relatively high that to get an affordable same-day return ticket from London you need to restrict the time you've got in York (most lower priced tickets aren't valid for departures before 0930) and/or commit yourself weeks in advance to specific departure tines in both directions.
On Oxbridge, I'd say Oxford feels the scruffier, personally. The two cities are roughly the same size, but Oxford's the commercial centre of a bigger and richer region, has a larger student resident population and attracts a much larger number of transient, unattached youths, which all put more pressure on the town centres. Most of its few major shopping streets are downright hideous (though it's quite an achievement to pack quite so many mobile phone shops into such a tiny area), and it's almost impossible to visit the historic core without going through them.
Though Cambridge probably has the edge architecturally (but only just), Oxford's got a lot more non-architectural things worth visiting. It's possible (I've not noticed this before, but this might be behind Mme Perdu's observation) that Oxford colleges, and the university, spend more more on upgrading and maintaining their fabric than at Cambridge, so the historic stuff in Oxford might look less scruffy: it's really quite shocking, looking at "50 years ago" photos in the local paper, to see how bad a state the city's stonework was in even quite recently, and the general level of care and maintenance of Oxford's physical heritage now strikes me as rather higher than in most Continental historic cities.
Which said, there are only two fully-functioning medieval, collegiate, river-based university cities in the world. The similarities between them more than outweigh the differences.
Time obviously is, or you wouldn't be restricting yourself to a same-day trip. AS I've already said, train fares to York are so relatively high that to get an affordable same-day return ticket from London you need to restrict the time you've got in York (most lower priced tickets aren't valid for departures before 0930) and/or commit yourself weeks in advance to specific departure tines in both directions.
On Oxbridge, I'd say Oxford feels the scruffier, personally. The two cities are roughly the same size, but Oxford's the commercial centre of a bigger and richer region, has a larger student resident population and attracts a much larger number of transient, unattached youths, which all put more pressure on the town centres. Most of its few major shopping streets are downright hideous (though it's quite an achievement to pack quite so many mobile phone shops into such a tiny area), and it's almost impossible to visit the historic core without going through them.
Though Cambridge probably has the edge architecturally (but only just), Oxford's got a lot more non-architectural things worth visiting. It's possible (I've not noticed this before, but this might be behind Mme Perdu's observation) that Oxford colleges, and the university, spend more more on upgrading and maintaining their fabric than at Cambridge, so the historic stuff in Oxford might look less scruffy: it's really quite shocking, looking at "50 years ago" photos in the local paper, to see how bad a state the city's stonework was in even quite recently, and the general level of care and maintenance of Oxford's physical heritage now strikes me as rather higher than in most Continental historic cities.
Which said, there are only two fully-functioning medieval, collegiate, river-based university cities in the world. The similarities between them more than outweigh the differences.
