Jericho
Jericho began as a place people ended up when the city gates had already closed — a pub, a farm, a name that meant somewhere just beyond the walls. That outsider quality never entirely left. Walk down Walton Street today and you pass a cinema that has been showing films since 1913, a former church where people now drink coffee under high Victorian arches, and a pub where Radiohead played before anyone knew what Radiohead was.
The streets behind Walton Street are tight rows of two-up, two-down workers' houses built in the late 1820s for canal labourers and printing-press compositors. They have outlasted every plan to demolish them.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who keep coming back tend to time a visit around the Jericho Street Fair in mid-June, when Walton Street closes to traffic and the neighbourhood turns briefly ceremonial. Outside that window, the morning slot at FREUD — the café in the old church — is worth knowing about: quieter than the lunch crowd, and the building earns its own long look.
Deals in Jericho
Book directly at the providerHow Jericho came to be
The name goes back to 1668 and a pub called Jericho House — a stopover for travellers who arrived after Oxford's gates had shut for the night. The area stayed loosely rural until 1825, when two announcements appeared within a fortnight of each other in Jackson's Oxford Journal: a new iron foundry on Walton Well Road, and the University's plans for a Printing Press nearby. Houses followed fast. Clarendon Street was advertised in October 1826; King Street was up by 1827.
For over a century the neighbourhood housed the people who built and printed things for the University without belonging to it. By the early 1960s the council was planning demolition and light industrial replacement. A campaign led by councillor Olive Gibbs and the Jericho Residents Association stopped it. Council grants in the late 1960s and early 1970s upgraded what remained, and the Victorian street grid survived intact.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Oxford's weather applies: mild and damp through autumn and winter, with spring arriving slowly. The streets are pleasant to walk from May through September, and the Street Fair in mid-June usually catches a reasonable afternoon.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.