For the most part, Oxford University’s college grounds are completely different than ours. Really, the only thing similar is the presence of dorm rooms and class rooms.
Most of the Oxford college campuses are over 300 years old and Some of them are almost 800 years old! This makes them some of the oldest and most prestigious college campuses in the world.
UA in Oxford takes place at Worcester College in Oxford. Worcester College was established in 1714 but its campus is even older than that. Worcester, just like most of the other Colleges at Oxford, has sacred grounds. This means that the grass on the main quad, and several other areas of its campus, cannot be walked on. Walking on sacred grounds in Oxford is often met with expulsion.
Outside of the sacred grounds, most oxford college campuses also feature extensive wild gardens and some of them even grow fruits. Worcester grows all kinds of fruits that are sacred as well, and they cannot be harvested by students. The gardens as well are incredibly loved. They feature hundreds of different kinds of flowers and trees. These gardens and landscaping are nothing like the landscaping of US colleges. They are maintained but they are wild gardens with tall grasses, like nothing we see on campuses in the US.
Additionally, many of the colleges at Oxford have canals or lakes which are incredibly important for boat races and punting. These aspects of Oxford campuses are very different than what I was used to on Alabama’s campus but they also proved to be some of my favorite aspects of Oxford.
I have always considered UA to be extremely beautiful, and I still do. The campuses in Oxford were a different kind of beauty than those that we have here. UA’s campus is extremely well maintained, just like oxford. The layout of the campus grounds and the sacred aspects of Oxford campuses stood out to me as different than in the US and because of that, incredibly beautiful.