The cliché about Oxford – and as a resident of the city, I have skin in the game here – is that it’s the most beautiful city in Britain. Think of all the writers and poets who have rhapsodised about its glories, from Evelyn Waugh immortalising (some would say fossilising) it in Brideshead Revisited to Matthew Arnold’s famous description of it in his poem ‘Thyrsis’ as ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires/She needs not June for beauty’s heightening’.