New College, Oxford

Where it sits. New College lies in the north-east corner of Oxford's walled medieval city, entered through a narrow lane off Holywell Street or, in summer, through the gate on New College Lane beneath the Bridge of Sighs. The site is unusually large for a central college because it was built on ground cleared after the Black Death, and its eastern boundary is a surviving 200-metre stretch of the thirteenth-century city wall, complete with bastions and a wall-walk — the college is contractually obliged to maintain it, and the Lord Mayor still inspects it every three years.

The story behind it. William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and twice Chancellor of England, founded the college in 1379 and admitted its first scholars in 1386. Its formal name is the College of St Mary — "New" distinguished it from the older St Mary's, now Oriel — and its design was genuinely new: Wykeham grouped chapel, hall, library, kitchen and student chambers around a single enclosed quadrangle, a plan every later Oxford and Cambridge college copied. He paired it with Winchester College as a feeder school, creating the first two-tier educational foundation in England. The Great Quadrangle is Wykeham's, though a third storey was added in the 1670s. The chapel holds a fourteenth-century reredos rebuilt in the nineteenth century, misericords carved in the 1380s, Jacob Epstein's stark 1951 alabaster Lazarus standing in the antechapel, and El Greco's Saint James the Great. The cloister, completed around 1400, was consecrated as burial ground and remains one of the quietest enclosed spaces in the city; a large evergreen holm oak grows in the middle of its garth.

On screen. New College's Harry Potter appearance is confined to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but it produced two of the film's best-known shots, both filmed in and around the cloister:

• The holm oak in the cloister garth is where Draco Malfoy taunts Harry, and where Mad-Eye Moody transfigures him into a white ferret and bounces him off the flagstones — the sequence fans call the amazing bouncing ferret. The tree itself is a real evergreen oak, planted long before the film and now propped and cabled; college gardeners have had to manage the attention it attracts.
• The cloister walks appear as Hogwarts corridors in the sequence after Harry's name emerges from the Goblet, when the other students shun him and wear badges reading "Potter Stinks". The scene in which Harry warns Cedric Diggory about the dragons was also shot at the cloister's edge.

Nothing else in the film came from here; the college's hall and chapel do not appear, and the surrounding castle architecture in those shots is Leavesden set and digital extension. The production spent several days on site during a vacation, which is the only way a working college can absorb a crew of that size.

What you actually see today. The visitor route runs through the Great Quadrangle to the chapel and antechapel, then into the cloister, then out to the garden quad and the mound. The garden — laid out in the seventeenth century, with a raised mound built from earth and rubble that predates it — sits inside the angle of the old city wall, and the herbaceous borders along the wall are among the best-kept in Oxford. The chapel's misericords are worth asking about; carved in the 1380s, they include a schoolmaster birching a pupil and a man wrestling a lion, and can be viewed when the stalls are not in use. Evensong is sung by the college choir, one of the oldest continuously operating in the world, and is free to attend during term.

Getting there and timing. Oxford station is a twenty-minute walk west, an hour from London Paddington or Marylebone by train. The city centre is closed to through traffic, so drivers use the Thornhill or Redbridge park-and-ride sites. Visitor entry is ticketed, with a modest charge, and the entrance moves between Holywell Street and New College Lane depending on the season. Hours are short and vary sharply with term — during examination periods in May and June large parts of the college close entirely, and the cloister may be shut without notice for services or filming. Surfaces are old flagstones with steps into the chapel and cloister, so access is uneven. The best hour is the first after opening: the cloister is enclosed on all four sides, holds little light, and empties quickly of everyone who came only for the tree.