UK - Day 11

Slept backward with my feet at the headboard, so my head was right at the window and I could sleep with the breeze on my face and wake up to sunlight and the view of the courtyard below. This is a nice way to wake up!
We take a train to Oxford today, where the taxis are all painted up and they have parking lots for bicycles!
We have a long walk to our first appointment, and I can't help but snap pictures along the way:
Our destination: Sue Roaf's famous Ecohouse in a typical little neighborhood. From the front, it looks like any ol' house:
But, from the backyard, you can see it's been designed with a 'green' priority:
The property is deep enough that she can control obstacles that might block her southern exposure to the sun. No neighbor is close enough on that side to plant a tree or build anything that would take away her solar gain. The walls of the house are thick and heavily insulated, the windows are triple-pane, and the conservatory serves as a buffer so that the interior of the house itself stays at an almost constant temperature - varying only by 2 or 3 degrees throughout the day. When it does get cold outside, she has a little 'cackle oven' that radiates heat that flows right up the stairs to the 2 stories above as well as throughout the main space on the first level.
After the Ecohouse, we have lunch at a local pub with Rajat Gupta and Fionn Stevenson. The company is intriguing and the food is fabulous. This is where I fall right in love with Brie/Cranberry paninis.
Up next, a tour of the North Wall Arts Centre - an award-winning building that houses a private school of drama. Although it is a private school, they opted to open the theater and art gallery to the public to engage the community. It is actually an adaptive reuse project and incorporates an original Victorian school as well as a medeival wall, hence the name North Wall. That wall is now the exterior wall of the building, seen here:
The original Victorian school was built in 1873 and had a church with it as well. In 1888, they added a swimming pool that operated for the next 100 years. With the rules that come with remodeling a historic building, they were not allowed to take out the structure of the swimming pool. So, with some creative design, they turned it into the theater!
Once we're done admiring the arts centre, we have more walking and tours ahead but our tour guide is nowhere to be found. So, we sit around outside the North Wall and wait for awhile. An adorable little girl and her mother go walking by on the sidewalk where I'm sitting and the little girl is carrying a little white daisy. I just smile at her and she grins and tries to hand the flower to me. Knowing she'll take better care of it, I don't want to take it and tell her to put it in her hair instead. Her mother gives me a dirty look, but that little girl just grins from ear to ear and tucks it in her hair and keeps looking over her shoulder with that cute little smile as her mother tugs her off down the street. After all the walking and waiting today, that makes my day! There is a private elementary school letting out across the street and we watch in complete bewilderment while taxi after taxi stops in to pick up one child and take him/her away. What a strange way to go home from school every day...
Finally, our tour guide rides up on her bicycle and we get ready for another long walk, following her as she pushes her bicycle along. Next on the agenda is Oxford University, but we are early for our tour, so we duck inside the museum across the street to kill a little time.
One step inside, and I wish my nephews were with me! They'd love this!

I really like the environment created by the structure of the buildings and the bone structure of the prehistoric animals. The scale of it all is stunning. All around the perimeter of the main room are statues of famous scholars/inventors/etc. that tell their stories without even having to read their names. Any guesses who this might be? (hint: he's puzzling about an apple at his feet)
Then, as we cut across the grass toward our long-awaited tour of Oxford University, we see that something else has done the same thing!
Oxford University:
Each Oxford location has its own chapel...and this one is awe-inspiring.
The dining hall where the students still come to eat dinner each day, dressed in their robes:
The tile floor is wearing down and some portions have cracked and need replacing. With the bureaucracy that must be passed through in order to approve any work done on these incredible historic buildings and the time it takes to find and order tile that matches the original exactly, they have had to come up with a temporary solution. They have rugs made to look just like the tile and lay it over the cracked areas until a permanent solution can be done. In the daylight, the rugs are easy to see, but our tour guide says under different lighting at dinner time they blend right in.
They have one rather new building on campus - the Sloan Robinson building (2002) - that definitely stands apart from the others. The warden was very proud of the unconventional way they decided to use the brick, even though they were unable to mimic the brickwork on the original buildings. She was also proud of their efforts to make this building sustainable.
They have ground source heating and cooling and roll-down doors that come down on the inside of the large windows to hold in the heat overnight. They planned in open flexible spaces and use an evacuation system for their toilets (like in airplanes) rather than the water-consuming flush.
As much as she went on about their design considerations in this building, I couldn't help but be most impressed by the view outside the windows!
After Oxford U, we are free to explore the town or catch a train back. Most of us want to see more of this place - it is so packed with historic buildings - but we are tired of traveling in our "herd", so we break into smaller groups. Holly, Amy, Keith, Paul, Jesse and I wander some of the main streets taking pictures before looking for dinner. Outside one of the shops, this sign just goes to show what a hot topic climate change has become:
My group finds dinner at a little sandwich shop. They have display cases full of fabulous looking paninis, pasties, and such, AND a little ice cream cart too! Jesse and I are suckers for ice cream anytime and often make our meal choices by whether or not we can sneak in a sweet treat too. I have a cheese and onion pasty and a scoop of mango sorbet - sooooo yummy. And, the lad behind the counter has the best smile of the trip so far, so of course that makes my day again!
It is raining as the train pulls out from Oxford, headed to Paddington station (pictured above), and as we speed through the countryside, we are treated to a rainbow and the kind of lighting that makes the clouds and barley fields glow that warm yellow...not a good time of night to try taking pictures through a window of a moving train so the description will have to suffice.