WHY I LOVE

I've lived in Oxford for 37 years, but my first visit was on a drizzly winter day trip, which denied me the now familiar pleasure of sunlight on Cotswold stone. I was newly arrived from the southern hemisphere and had stumbled, shivering, into several old churches: St Peter-in-the-East, St Michael-at-the-Northgate. I was unused to the idea of a city that once had gates, darkness at 4pm, and the idea of north. 'Head north,' said a tweed-clad matron, when I got lost. Having given up geography, aged 12, I found this intimidating. Was an Oxford person required to carry a compass?

Now, after decades as a north Oxford resident, I catch myself saying the same thing. There's something very north-south about my perception of the city. Bicycle south from the pretty suburb of Wolvercote bordering the northern end of Port Meadow, and you can reach the old centre in three ways. Take the river path through the meadow and you pass the Godstow Nunnery and the tiny village of Binsey, where the felled Binsey Poplars, for which poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his lament, are now all replanted.

Take the canal towpath from the railway bridge and you pass Jericho, a cluster of Victorian press workers' cottages where the pubs have names like the Bookbinder's Arms and the skyline is dominated by St Barnabas, the church in which Thomas Hardy's bereaved heroine of Jude the Obscure writhes before the altar. Taking the bridge over the lock, you pass the barges opposite Worcester College. Now you are in the city centre.

Or take the Banbury Road and pedal south, past the houses of north Oxford that sprang up, from the 1860s, as family housing once dons were allowed to marry. Built in the heyday of John Ruskin's enthusiasm for brick Gothic, you will notice a few exceptions as you pass through Summertown, a one-time Georgian village, and past leafy Parktown - a Victorian mini-Bath, with its crescents that wind through to the Cherwell boathouse. Now almost in the old city centre, veer leftwards and enter Broad Street via Parks Road that runs past Keble College with its Fair Isle patterned brick version of a medieval college.

Across the road is the Science Museum, which has Lewis Carroll's dodo and the room in which the debate on evolution took place between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. At the back is an anthropological robber's den of shrunken heads, witches in bottles and detruncated Chinese bound feet.

If you don't diverge from the Banbury Road, you reach the church of St Mary Magdalen from which the Protestant Martyrs were led out to be burned at the stake. An x marks the spot in Broad Street, which has Balliol College, Blackwell's and the first Oxfam shop. Best of all, it has Christopher Wren's domed Sheldonian Theatre. Climb out onto the cupola for a view of hotchpotch domes and spires.

Back on the ground, cross through the forecourt of the Bodleian Library to Radcliffe Square and St Mary's Church. Enter the long vista of the High Street, lined, as it is, with college fronts.

Or enter the High Street via New College Lane. The college chapel contains Epstein's Lazarus, who is shedding his grave clothes against the filtered light of Joshua Reynold's stained glass windows. For a preview of the choirs of heaven, linger for the choral evensong, or dawdle in the cloisters where the smashed faces of the statuary bear witness to Henry VIII's iconoclast's hammers.

Once in the High Street, you confront Oxford's east-west dimension. Either go east, past Magdalen College with its deer park and the Angel and Greyhound Meadow to your left as you cross the Magdalen Bridge and, to your right, the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens, past the Plain from which you confront the buzzy Cowley Road or the quieter Iffley Road, where Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile.

Alternatively, you can take one of the lanes off the High Street to access Addison's Walk and Christchurch Meadow where cows are trampling buttercups along the riverbank. But you will have to leave your bicycle, since even wheeling it through the Meadow is an offence against the by-laws.

Across the road are Brewer and Pembroke Streets, which, since the urban vandalism of the 1960s, now give access to a blitzed no-man's-land, where there were once the city's West Gate and the little houses of St Ebbes. The fabulous thing about living in Oxford is not only that maze of honey-coloured old stone at its heart, but that you can get from anywhere to anywhere in a 15-minute bike ride from your own front door, from weeds and wildness to HMV, from dreaming spires to the supermarket, from riverside picnic to a performance of Tosca in a college library. And London is only 50 minutes by train.

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido (£7.99, Bloomsbury) is out now.