Oxford Audio Tour: Behind the Gown

Explore Oxford at your own pace

Oxford's spires belong to the colleges. The streets between them belong to a different city - the boatmen who built college barges at Folly Bridge, the bleating-voiced sweetshop keeper Alice Liddell loved, the Town Hall librarians who issued tickets for seventy-six years, the medieval brewers and vintners killed in the bell-tower brawl of 1355, the 17th-century ostler whose house is now the Bear, the two prison guards who held Oliver Butler's arms in 1952, the brewer dynasty whose 132 tied pubs watered the town from 1743, the bargees who hauled hay and slate to Hythe Bridge for six centuries, the bicycle apprentice William Morris who bought and buried Oxford's coal wharf for the price of a Cotswold college, the Bocardo turnkeys of St Michael's North Gate, the David Johns and the Mitzi Fellers who supplied 350 Christ Church mouths a sitting, the marmalade widow Sarah Jane Cooper, Mrs Ducker who ran an Oxford shoemaker's for a fortnight after her husband died, and the same Morris who built his first car in a stable on Longwall. This is the town that fed, clothed, printed, shod, brewed and ferried the gown - and whose names rarely made it onto the plaques.

Photo: Liv Cashman, Unsplash

Tour details

• Duration: 1 hour 28 minutes, entirely at your own pace
• Distance: around 3.9 km (2.4 miles)
• Stops: 14 landmarks, including Salter's Steamers, Folly Bridge, Oxford, Alice's Shop, 83 St Aldate's, Oxford, Oxford Town Hall
• Audio: up to 35 minutes of narration
• Starts at: Salter's Steamers, Folly Bridge, Oxford

Map data by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap contributors

How it works

• Book here and a redemption code arrives by email within minutes.
• Download the free AudaTours app on your phone and enter the code.
• Download the tour once and the whole thing works offline.
• Walk to the first stop and press play. The audio for each landmark starts automatically as you approach it, so your phone can stay in your pocket.

There is no fixed date and no start time. The date you pick at checkout does not matter, and the tour stays on your phone permanently, so you can use it whenever you next visit and walk it again as often as you like.

What is included

• Professionally narrated audio that plays automatically at each stop
• An interactive map showing the walking route between landmarks
• Full offline access once downloaded, so you need no data or signal
• Freedom to start, pause and resume whenever you like
• Lifetime access - your code never expires

Where you will stop

• Salter's Steamers, Folly Bridge, Oxford
• Alice's Shop, 83 St Aldate's, Oxford
• Oxford Town Hall
• Carfax Tower Oxford
• Oxford Castle
• Nuffield College, Oxford
• Hythe Bridge Oxford
• St Michael at the North Gate
• Covered Market, Oxford
• 6 Turl Street, Oxford
• Blackwell Bookshop Broad Street Oxford
• Morris Garage, Long Wall Street, Oxford
• 84 High Street, Oxford
• The Bear, Oxford

Image: AudaTours

What is AudaTours?

AudaTours turns a walk through a city into a story. Our guides bring landmarks to life with the history, the scandals and the detail you would never get from a plaque.

• Immersive: real stories about the places in front of you, not a dry commentary
• Offline: download once and use it with no data, anywhere
• At your own pace: start, pause and resume whenever you want
• Accurate: every story is built from verified historical sources and checked before release

Good to know

• This is a self-guided audio tour on your own phone. There is no in-person guide.
• It does not include entry to any building or site along the route.
• The landmarks on the tour are not affiliated with AudaTours.
• You need a smartphone with Android 7.0 or later, or iOS 16 or later.
• Bring headphones and start with a charged phone.

Who it suits

Solo travellers, couples, families and small groups who would rather explore on their own schedule than follow a guide and a fixed departure time. It suits a first visit, and it suits anyone who has already seen the famous sights and wants to know what actually happened in them.

Image credits

Photos: Ben Seymour, Liv Cashman, Tetiana Shyshkina (Unsplash).