Christ Church, Oxford

Where it sits. Christ Church stands at the southern end of St Aldate's in central Oxford, between the city's main north-south street and Christ Church Meadow, the pasture that runs down to the confluence of the Thames and the Cherwell. It is both a college of the University of Oxford and the cathedral church of the Diocese of Oxford — the only institution in the world that is simultaneously both — which is why it is never correctly called Christ Church College. Tom Quad, at its centre, is the largest quadrangle in Oxford at roughly 80 metres square.

The story behind it. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey suppressed St Frideswide's Priory in 1524 and began building Cardinal College on its site, intending something on a scale no other founder had attempted. He got as far as three sides of the great quadrangle, the kitchens and the Hall before his fall in 1529 stopped the work; Henry VIII refounded the establishment in 1546 as Christ Church, attaching the cathedral to it. The Hall, completed around 1529, is 35 metres long with a hammerbeam roof, and its walls carry portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Millais and Sutherland of alumni including thirteen British prime ministers, John Locke, William Penn and Lewis Carroll — Charles Dodgson taught mathematics here, and the brass firedogs and the dining-hall door with its long-necked hinges are part of the Alice folklore. Tom Tower, the gate tower over the St Aldate's entrance, was added by Christopher Wren in 1681-1682 on Wolsey's unfinished base; the bell inside, Great Tom, still rings 101 times at 9.05pm each evening, once for each original student on the foundation.

On screen. Christ Church is the most misunderstood Harry Potter location in England, and the confusion is worth clearing up. The Hogwarts Great Hall was not filmed here. The production photographed and measured the Christ Church Hall, then built an enlarged version at Leavesden with a scaled-up hammerbeam roof and a floor long enough for four house tables — the real Hall is too small, and no working college could give up its dining room for a decade. What was filmed at Christ Church is the approach to it. The fan-vaulted staircase beneath Bodley Tower, whose extraordinary ceiling springs from a single slender central pillar, appears in Philosopher's Stone as the stair where Professor McGonagall meets the arriving first-years, and again in Chamber of Secrets when Harry and Ron are caught after their flight in the Ford Anglia. The vault dates from 1638, executed in a deliberately medieval manner using seventeenth-century technique; the staircase itself was rebuilt by James Wyatt in 1805, and Bodley Tower above it is Victorian, named for the architect G. F. Bodley rather than Thomas Bodley of the library. The cloisters, the surviving fragment of the twelfth-century priory, were used for the scene in which Hermione shows Harry the trophy case bearing his father's name as a Quidditch Seeker.

What you actually see today. The visitor route enters through the Meadow Gate on the east side, crosses Tom Quad past Mercury, the ornamental pool with its bronze copy of Giambologna's flying figure, and climbs the Bodley staircase to the Hall. The cathedral follows: a compact, dark Romanesque building of the 1160s with an unusual double-arched arcade, the fourteenth-century St Frideswide watching-loft, and four windows by Edward Burne-Jones, including the St Frideswide window of 1858. Christ Church Picture Gallery, reached from Canterbury Quad, holds around 300 paintings and 2,000 drawings, with sheets by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Dürer, and is almost always quiet.

Getting there and timing. Oxford station is a fifteen-minute walk west; London Paddington and Marylebone are both around an hour by train. The city centre is effectively closed to cars, so drivers use the park-and-ride sites at Redbridge or Pear Tree. Tickets are timed and sell out in summer, so booking ahead genuinely matters. The Hall closes to visitors around lunchtime every day for the college's own meal, and it closes entirely for feasts — the college publishes the closures, and turning up unaware is the most common disappointment here. Term-time restricts access to some quads. The Meadow walk, an hour's circuit round to the Isis and back past the college boathouses, is free and open from dawn, and is the best way to see the building from outside without a ticket.