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Too busy to be comfortable and too modern to be pretty, the Carfax is not a place to hang around, but it is overlooked by an interesting remnant of the medieval town, a chunky fourteenth-century tower , adorned by a pair of clock-tower jacks dressed in vaguely Roman gear. The tower is all that remains of St Martin's church, where legend has it that William Shakespeare stood sponsor at the baptism of one of his friend's children. As you stroll east along the High Street from Carfax, the first building to demand your attention is St Mary the Virgin - on the left just after Brasenose College. The church is a hotchpotch of architectural styles, mostly fifteenth century, but with an elaborate, thirteenth-century pinnacled spire and a distinctive Baroque porch, flanked by chunky corkscrewed pillars. The church's interior is disappointingly mundane, but the tower (daily: July & Aug 9am-7pm; rest of year closes 5pm; GBP1.60) - entered round the back opposite the Radcliffe Camera - provides exquisite views over the centre. Further along the High Street is University College (no set opening times; tel 01865/276602), where the long curved facade and twin gateway towers date from the seventeenth century. Known as "Univ", the college claims Alfred the Great as its founder, but things really got going with a formal endowment in 1249, making it Oxford's oldest college - though nothing of that period survives. A year Univ may prefer to forget is 1811, when it expelled Percy Bysshe Shelley for distributing a paper called The Necessity of Atheism . Guilt later induced Univ to accept a memorial to the poet, who drowned in Italy in 1822: the white marble monument, showing the limp body of the poet borne by winged lions and mourned by the Muse of Poetry, occupies a shrine-like domed chamber in the northeast corner of the Front Quad. The college's most famous recent alumnus was Bill Clinton, the non-inhaling Rhodes Scholar; former Australian premier Bob Hawke also studied here.
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