Westgate Oxford

The one place in central Oxford that will seat a group late, in the dry, with a lift to the door — and the only one with a 13th-century friary displayed under the food court.

Westgate opened on 24 October 2017, replacing a 1972 centre by the Oxford City Architect's Office that had been demolished the previous year. It is owned by the Westgate Oxford Alliance, a joint venture between Landsec and The Crown Estate. Be clear about what it is. The shops are the same national and international brands you would find in Leeds or Bristol, and of the ten restaurants and bars on the roof terrace, not one is an Oxford independent — they are Alchemist, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Bones, Mowgli, Nando's, Pho, Six by Nico, Sticks 'n' Sushi, Victors and The Beefy Boys. Maya's, a speciality coffee shop on Turn Again Lane that began as a horsebox cafe, is essentially the only Oxford independent in the building. If you want Oxford, the Covered Market and the old pubs are a five-minute walk away. What Westgate is genuinely good for is the thing central Oxford is worst at. Most of the city stops serving early and much of it is up a staircase. The roof terrace is free, open to anyone, and reached by public lift or escalator, with accessible toilets and a Changing Places facility on the same level. The restaurants keep going long after the centre's own 20:00 close — several to midnight, a couple to 01:00 at weekends. It seats a large group at short notice, it works in the rain, and it solves a wet Tuesday with children in a way the colleges cannot. The view from the terrace is a general prospect of the city rather than a dreaming-spires panorama; go for the air and the tables, not the skyline. Curzon has five screens on the roof terrace, with a daytime cafe-bar and a separate bar after dark. On the lower ground floor, Westgate Social is a street-food hall — Mexican, American barbecue, Taiwanese fried chicken, New York pizza by the slice. The more interesting story is underneath. This is the site of the Oxford Greyfriars, the Franciscan friary founded in 1224, which Henry III allowed to breach the city wall in 1244 and which was pulled down at the Dissolution in 1538. Its gardens became the market gardens known as Paradise, built over in the 1820s as the terraced streets of St Ebbe's — a district of more than 900 properties cleared between the 1950s and the 1970s, an act one alderman later called the biggest mistake Oxford ever made. The excavation ahead of the current building, by Oxford Archaeology in 2015–16, uncovered the friary's cloister, kitchen and refectory, and won Best Archaeological Project at the 2016 British Archaeology Awards. A section of 13th-century Greyfriars cloister floor tiles is permanently displayed inside the centre. Roger Bacon was buried in the friary church; a plaque to him sits on the surviving stretch of city wall at Turn Again Lane, alongside the three houses Oxford Preservation Trust rescued in 1971 and still occupies.