51.7520°N / 1.2577°W · United Kingdom
This map shows what was not built before it shows what was. The countryside comes right into the middle of the city, and it has never been asked to leave.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
To the west, one river splits into several arms and threads its way down the sheet; to the east, another comes down from the north and joins it at the foot of the centre. Between them, the built fabric is tight and short-streeted. North-west, a broad band of open ground follows the river for a kilometre; south, between the two rivers, a second one reaches almost to the colleges. Dense building has only spilled east, onto a hill, and north along one road. A ring road loops the whole thing.
The meadows draw, and that is worth saying because it is not the rule. On these base maps green exists only where the data records it, and many towns lose their hills and parks entirely. Here the open ground carries its tint, so the structure of the city survives on paper exactly as it works on the ground. Two things will not be there: the railway running north to south beside the river, and the hill to the east, which carries no woodland and therefore no tone at all.
This is one of the few prints in the collection with two real surfaces to work: water, in several arms, and open ground, in two large stretches. So you can set a landscape rather than a diagram. The balance to watch is between the two: if the meadows go too pale they read as blank paper and the whole idea collapses, and if they go too strong they compete with the rivers. Keep them lighter than the water and darker than the sky of the margin.
Portrait, rivers down the sides and the centre between them. The setting favours the meadows over the ring road: pull back and the ring closes, but the open ground shrinks, and the open ground is the subject. The chosen frame keeps both meadows at their full size and lets the ring run off the edges.
The title, one line under it, the coordinates. The name of a college, a crossroads, a year with no charter behind it: that line names what the densest part of the weave cannot say for itself.
The name means the ford of the oxen and is attested in the tenth century, with the first defences probably a century older. The earliest plan was four roads meeting at a single crossroads, and that crossroads is still the centre of the city today. On your print it is the point where the tightest streets converge, and it has not moved in eleven hundred years.
The broad open ground to the north-west is the common pasture of the town's freemen, a right already recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. It is said never to have been ploughed, though that part is tradition rather than record. What is certain is that it has been grazed and not built on for nine hundred and forty years, which is why your print has a kilometre of empty ground beside the city centre.
Teaching is attested here from 1096, but there is no charter and no foundation day. The university took off from 1167, when Henry II barred English students from Paris and they came here instead. The colleges are inside the tight weave of the centre, and no base map can pick them out: on your print they are simply the densest part of the drawing.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The path across the open ground on a winter morning, the lane between two walls, the bridge where the second river comes in. The meadows are the same for everyone. The way you crossed them is not.
Compose my Oxford print
