Christ Church Cathedral

England's smallest cathedral, and the only one doubling as a college chapel — with a Norman interior, a pilgrimage shrine and Burne-Jones glass in the space of a parish church.

Christ Church Cathedral is two buildings in one, and the arrangement is unique in the Church of England: it is the cathedral of the Diocese of Oxford and, at the same time, the chapel of Christ Church college. That double life explains its scale. This is the smallest cathedral in England, closer in size to a large parish church than to Winchester or York, and you reach it not through a west front on a close but through a college quadrangle. Its foundations are older than either role. An Augustinian priory dedicated to St Frideswide, Oxford's patron saint, stood here by 1122, and her shrine drew pilgrims from at least the twelfth century until the Reformation; what survives of it now stands in the Latin Chapel. Cardinal Wolsey chose the site for his own grand college in 1522 and began demolishing the west end to make room for it. He fell from power before he finished, Henry VIII took the project over in 1529 and refounded it in 1532, and in 1546 the King moved the newly created See of Oxford here from Osney — which is how a priory church became a cathedral without ever being built as one. What to look for: the late Norman nave, choir and transepts, with their heavy round arches; the extraordinary pendant lierne vault over the choir, a piece of late-medieval stone engineering worth standing under; the fourteenth-century Becket window, whose depiction of Thomas Becket had his face removed rather than the whole window destroyed during the Reformation; and five windows by Morris & Co designed by Edward Burne-Jones, an Oxford undergraduate before he was a painter. Entry is through the college on its visitor ticket. Choral evensong is sung in term and is free to attend.