Holywell Music Room
Opened in 1748 and reckoned the oldest purpose-built concert hall in Europe, and still one of the loveliest rooms anywhere to hear chamber music.
Opened in 1748 and reckoned the oldest purpose-built concert hall in Europe, and still one of the loveliest rooms anywhere to hear chamber music.
Tucked down Holywell Street, a cobbled lane behind the Bodleian, is a plain, unassuming building that most people walk straight past. They shouldn't. The Holywell Music Room opened its doors in 1748, and it is generally reckoned to be the first building in Europe raised specifically for public musical performance, the oldest purpose-built concert hall on the continent. Nearly three centuries on it is still doing exactly what it was built to do, and hearing a string quartet in a room designed for the purpose before Mozart was born is one of the quiet privileges of a visit to Oxford.
By the 1740s Oxford's weekly “music meetings” had outgrown the taverns and college halls that hosted them, and money was raised by public subscription to build a room of their own. The result, opened in July 1748, was deliberately simple: a high, rectangular hall with a barrel ceiling and a gallery, designed so that sound carries and an audience of a couple of hundred can sit close to the players. That intimacy is the whole point, and it is why musicians still prize the room today. By tradition the chamber organ at the end of the hall was a gift from Handel, one of those Oxford stories that may be part legend but has been told for so long it has become part of the place.
Remarkably little has changed. The room has been in near-continuous use as a concert hall for close to three hundred years, quietly outlasting grander venues, and it remains a working part of the University's musical life rather than a museum piece. You come not to look at it but to hear something in it, which is exactly as its builders intended.
The easiest way in for a visitor is the long-running series of Sunday-morning Coffee Concerts. Doors open around a quarter past eleven, there is coffee, and at eleven-thirty a quartet or small ensemble plays an hour or so of chamber music in that famous acoustic. It is informal, unstuffy and inexpensive, and being back outside by lunchtime it leaves the rest of the day free for the colleges or the meadow. The room hosts plenty of evening concerts and festivals through the year too.
We keep the current run of concerts on our What's On page, so it is worth a look when you are planning dates, and tickets are best booked ahead as the room is small and the Sunday concerts often sell out. Check programmes and times on the Oxford Coffee Concerts site before you set off.
Oxford is about thirty-five minutes from Well Cottage by car, and Holywell Street sits right in the old university quarter. Central Oxford is largely closed to through traffic, so the calm way to do it is to leave the car at one of the park-and-ride sites on the ring road and take the bus in, which drops you a short walk away. A Sunday Coffee Concert pairs naturally with the rest of the street: the Turf Tavern is hidden down an alley almost next door, the King's Arms is at the end of it, and the Bodleian Library and Christ Church are a few minutes' walk. Our guide to a day in Oxford ties the whole city together.
“There's nothing quite like a Sunday-morning quartet in the Holywell. The room is so small and so old that you feel you're hearing the music the way it was meant to be heard, a few feet from the players, before the rest of the day has even started.”
A morning concert in Oxford, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.