Somewhere between freshers’ week and finals, most students end up with an email address they signed up for years before they ever set foot in Oxford. Scholarship applications, references from tutors, internship offers, bank details for student loans and even health correspondence with the university all tend to pass through that email address.
Add in the habit of using one login for almost every society sign-up, society mailing list and online account going back years, and it becomes clear why a growing number of students are starting to think more carefully about where all of this information actually sits, and how secure it is.
Why students are rethinking their email account
A student’s email account carries more weight than people often assume. It is the address attached to graduate job applications, references, visa paperwork for study abroad, and increasingly, financial details tied to student finance and part-time work. If that account is compromised, the fallout goes well beyond a few spam messages. Switching to an email service built around encryption means that even sensitive correspondence with tutors, colleges or future employers stays private, without changing how you actually use email day to day.
It is a particularly relevant shift for anyone applying for jobs or further study, where personal statements, references and offer letters often sit in an inbox for months before anyone gets round to deleting them.
The data you’ve forgotten about
Think about how many forms ask for your university email address: library accounts, society memberships, internship portals, even some banking apps for students. Each of those is a small thread connecting your identity to that one inbox. Most students have no idea how many services still hold their data years after they stopped using them, and a single breach at any one of those services can expose far more than people expect.
A periodic clear-out is worth doing, even if it feels tedious. Search your inbox for old confirmation emails, work out which accounts you no longer use, and either delete them or at least update the password to something unique.
Protecting applications and correspondence
For finalists in particular, this matters more than it might seem. Graduate scheme applications often involve sharing passport scans, references and personal statements over email, sometimes to addresses that turn out to be less secure than expected. Cherwell’s own coverage of has touched on how students can be targeted by cyber criminals, and email is very much part of that picture, even if it gets far less attention than social media.
Setting up two-factor authentication on your main accounts takes a few minutes and makes a real difference, particularly for anything connected to finance or job applications. It is one of those tasks that feels unnecessary right up until the moment it isn’t.
Building better habits before you need them
The good news is that none of this requires becoming an expert in cybersecurity. The UK government’s guidance on staying secure online lays out the basics in plain language, and most of it boils down to using strong, unique passwords, keeping software updated and being cautious about what you click. For students juggling deadlines, societies and a social life, a secure inbox is one less thing to worry about.
Whether you’re sending your dissertation to a supervisor at midnight or applying for a graduate role you have had your eye on since first year, your email account underpins a huge amount of what happens next. Giving it a bit more thought now is a small investment that pays off long after you’ve left Oxford.
Sarah Outen was seventeen when curious seals surfaced beside her kayak off the coast of Scotland: “I remember very clearly having seals follow the boat and try and nibble at the toggles on the boat, and I just love that interaction,” she says. “It was as close to the water as you’re going to be. You’re never going to be off the water, but it was a way to be in that world.”
The desire to immerse herself in the natural world without trying to conquer it has shaped almost every chapter of her life. Outen is one of Britain’s most accomplished endurance adventurers: the youngest person and first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean, later the first woman to row solo across the Pacific from Japan to Alaska, before completing a 20,000-mile, mostly human-powered journey around the world by rowing boat, bicycle, and kayak. The expeditions earned her an MBE, a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society and several Guinness World Records, yet when she talks about adventure, records barely feature. Instead, she returns to the sea itself: its unpredictability, its wildlife, and the quiet relationship it demands.
“I was very active, doing lots of sports at school,” she says. “I was very lucky. I had lots of opportunities through school for different sports and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and then through a local kayaking club.” She first learnt to kayak at around eleven or twelve, before discovering Ellen MacArthur’s account of sailing solo around the world as a teenager. “These different things kind of just led me to a sense that one day I would like to do a big journey somewhere, somehow, but I didn’t know what it would be.”
At home, “there was a lot of encouragement for trying new things. I don’t feel there was ever anything that we were told: we don’t want you to do that, don’t have a go.” The greater influence, however, came from watching her father live with rheumatoid arthritis: “I saw him not be able to do lots of things that he used to love doing. I saw him not be able to walk as much and become wheelchair bound.”
For years, she interpreted that experience in the only way she knew how. “I’ve got to go and make the most of it, and at all costs will push through,” she says. Looking back, she sees something more complicated: “I’ve got one go in this body, and I need to really honour it, value it. Yes, push myself, and do things that I want to do, but I’ve got to really look after it. Because actually, I’ve experienced a lot of health challenges, in part driven by how I’ve pushed myself in the past, and sort of just ignored all the signals from my body.”
The University of Oxford arrived almost by accident. She had applied to Worcester College without really understanding the admissions process and instead received an offer from St Hugh’s. This became one of the happier accidents of her life: “Just the idea of not being able to walk on the grass felt really formal,” she says of Worcester. St Hugh’s, by contrast, felt immediately welcoming: “There was something really relaxed about the atmosphere… it’s got these lovely big gardens that you can walk all over.” She still describes ending up there as “a total gift.”
But Oxford was also harder than she had anticipated. During her gap year, she had been diagnosed with hypothyroidism. Only in retrospect did she realise how much it shaped her experience: “Some patterns that were playing out whilst I was at Oxford, they actually just weren’t being managed properly.”
What kept her grounded was the water: “I loved being a part of the boat club, especially, and the fact that that, for me, was a way to get out and about pretty much every day of the week on the water.” She still laughs about one race against the men’s crew. “We won, we beat the boys… One of our crew members made us some T-shirts afterwards, saying: ‘Making boys cry since 2006′, because it was alleged that there were some tears in the boys’ crew.”
However, a ruptured cruciate ligament during her first term ended previous hopes of an army scholarship: “I couldn’t do that anymore and I didn’t really have a plan at that stage. So I thought in my head, oh, okay, I’m going to row across an ocean.” Then, during her second year, the idea began to crystallise. An email advertising an Atlantic rowing race arrived just as Ben Fogle and James Cracknell’s crossing was being shown on television: “I was just blown away by the idea of it. I thought, wow, this is a really cool equation. I love oceans and I love rowing. Put these together.”
Just before her second-year exams, her father died suddenly: “It was a real shock, and very quickly again, I knew that I still wanted to go and row across an ocean, but that actually I did want to do it solo,” she says. “Nobody knew my dad. Like, as in the people that I was chatting to that might become the team, didn’t know him. It felt like a very personal mission. The ocean was this big, unknown, sometimes scary place that I had to cross. And grief was also this big, unknown, sometimes scary place that I needed to find a way through and to sort of live with.”
Turning that decision into reality took another three years: “To graduate, fundraise, build a boat, learn what to do with the boat, get sponsors, raise money, train, figure it out.” She describes it as solving a giant jigsaw puzzle: “Starting out with a mind map… okay, I’m here, I need to get to here, what are these different bits that I’m going to need?” What made it feel achievable was its ordinariness: “I had a real sense in that first journey that this isn’t rocket science. Other people have done it, so therefore I’ve got a good chance of doing it.”
She puts a lot of emphasis on the beginning: “We all have things we would like to do. And also, we can sometimes get a bit caught up in all the reasons why we can’t, why we shouldn’t. So, often, I think even just getting to the start of any project, be it an ocean or a degree or whatever it might be, it’s a big deal.”
Training for the row was surprisingly simple compared with organising it: “I focused on building an endurance base, so I borrowed a rowing machine and put it in my mum’s greenhouse, and I would go and row for a few hours at a time,” she says. First aid, radios, navigation, “how to fix bits of the boat,” took priority, on the theory that fitness would build itself at sea. What she hadn’t anticipated was the relentless mental load of being entirely responsible for herself: “The boat’s moving in some way, all of the time… you always need to be switched on, because you need to make sure you’ve closed the door so that if you were to capsize, suddenly you’re not flooded with water. It was a big adjustment, and I think that took me by surprise a little bit, was just how much of an adjustment that was.”
To survive months alone at sea, she learnt not to think in terms of the ocean: “I was reminding myself that I was as prepared as possible, and just taking it a little bit at a time, cutting down the overall journey… What about the next couple of days? What about the next hour? Sometimes, just what about the next minute?” It is a philosophy that now extends far beyond her expeditions: “We can get really overwhelmed when we look at everything that we’re trying to manage. There’s something going: okay, what can we control? I can’t control the weather. But I can control the thoughts that I’m having, or how I’m relating to those thoughts. I can control how I’m looking after my body, what I’m eating, and when I am sleeping. Bit by bit, then we can find a way through the stormiest of times, or the biggest of obstacles, when we kind of break it down into little bits.”
The ocean tested that outlook almost immediately. Her first attempt lasted just eleven days before deteriorating weather forced her back. “I looked at it as a warm-up lap,” she says. “Yes, I had failed. I had not made it across the ocean, but I was looking at it as: great, I’ve just survived eleven days at sea. I looked after myself. I still want to go back and have another go.”
The second crossing took 130 days. It made her the first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean and only the fourth person ever to do so, although she dismisses the records almost as quickly as they’re mentioned. “It was more about what the journey meant to me than it did about any statistic or record,” she says. “For me, it’s more about the experiences… certainly with that first journey, it was about honouring my dad and honouring my grief and my healing, really.” Her emphasis is on sincere gratitude: “I just feel extraordinarily privileged and lucky, fortunate to have had the support of so many people… whether it’s a big sponsor putting in money, or Joe Bloggs at the end of the road encouraging me.”
She expected to miss the water when she landed, yet “about a month before I was due to land, I didn’t want to go back to land,” she says. “I was so comfortable in my boat world that I was a bit scared about what it would be like to transition back to being on land.” The landing itself, in Mauritius, was dangerous. “I ended up crashing onto a coral reef, essentially,” she says. Once she was safe, the adjustment turned out to be its own ordeal. “It was quite mind-boggling. It was quite stressful to try and keep tabs on things,” she says, remembering watching other people move her belongings around.
“At sea, I had very limited battery supplies that were charged by the sun. It was a real matter of life and death that I managed that battery supply… whereas on land, I had people who haven’t had those experiences, and they are leaving lights on, they’re wasting some food.” Confronted by a supermarket shelf of ten kinds of orange juice, she says it “was really stressful in new ways”. Alongside all that, there was real pleasure too. “It’s lovely to see friends and family. It was great to be able to walk on land and appreciate all the different foods… It was great to get a massage, my muscles were happy. I got to see my mum’s dog again.”
That heightened sensitivity has never quite left. On her later round-the-world journey, she watched wind patterns shift: “seeing disruption to that, which was having a direct impact on what I was doing and plastic pollution, which was really worrying”. What troubles her most is the distance most people keep from it: “There’s still quite a lot of blind spots for a lot of people. It feels like there’s this kind of ‘Oh, it’s out there somewhere, my activities don’t matter, or it’s not impacting me yet.’ That feels bothersome and is really worrying to me.”
The pace of human-powered travel transformed the way she experienced the world: “You feel a mountain range very differently when you’re chugging up it slowly on a bike… you would have felt the changing of the seasons, the changing of the landscapes.” The bicycle, she discovered, was also a universal conversation starter: “Even if I didn’t have the same language, we would see bikes, and there would be this sort of shared sense of ‘Hi, yeah, we’re on this thing together.’”
Image credit: Sarah Outen, with permission.
The biggest challenge came in the North Pacific: a typhoon, subsided to a tropical storm by the time it reached her, which she chose to ride out: “Knowing what I know now, in that wonderful thing of hindsight, I wouldn’t have stayed. But that was who I was at that time. I kind of looked through all the information that we had, and I thought that we had a good chance of getting through it.”
What followed was chaos: “It was so violent and so chaotic and so frightening to be a part of that.” Three days strapped into her bunk in a racing harness, watching through the cabin door: “All of these waves, these huge waves, topping out at fifteen metres, just looked like the Alps. Everything was white, and there was spray going everywhere, and I saw an albatross just soaring over the top of it. And I just thought, wow, I wish I were the albatross. I have never been so frightened in my life, certainly not for a sustained period. It was horrible and very uncomfortable.”
The Japan Coast Guard rescued her, but her boat, Gulliver, could not be brought with her and was cast adrift. “To me, it felt like I had sort of let my boat down somehow,” she says. “When you’re solo with a boat, you’re a little team, you look after each other.”
The sheer weight of emotional aftermath came after: “My way of coping was to sort of almost get on with it, and kind of put it to one side, what had happened, and just focus on moving forward, because I wanted to go back to sea.” Months later, the reckoning was almost forced: “I was having nightmares, I was crying all the time. I was scared all the time. I was really struggling.” When Gulliver herself turned up years later in the Philippines, during the making of a documentary about the journey, it started again. “Lots was being stirred up, and around that time, Gulliver turned up in the Philippines, which brought up lots of memories and emotions. It was like, okay, there’s another layer of healing to do here. We need to deal with this in a more proactive way.”
By the time she finally came home for good, something had to change: “So much of the journey had been about pushing forwards, going, keeping moving, going, getting to the next bit, going,” she says. “And actually, what I came to understand with hindsight, a few years later, was that it took quite a few years to process, to settle, to unwind some of the energy that was in my body from those journeys… now I needed to learn this whole new way of being that was more about softness and yielding and gentleness.”
She laughs gently at who she used to be: “I laugh at my younger self that she was so audacious to put together something as complex as that and as massive. I definitely didn’t fully comprehend just what it would take, emotionally, physically, financially, logistically, energetically.” Asked what she would tell her eighteen-year-old self, she says: “I wish I had known more about the impact of stress and food on my health, and on my autoimmunity and had more softness, and that I paid more attention to things like stretching.” Then she lets herself off the hook: “Some things you have to go through stuff to learn the lessons, I think. You’re not ready to know them until the point at which you’ve learnt them for yourself.”
That difficult year, 2018, is also what led her to psychotherapy. She had been advised, coming off the journey, to take her time before deciding what came next. Working with a couple of different therapists, one of them an equine therapist, something became clear: “I thought, I want to be alongside people as they explore their worlds.” Indeed, the parallel with her old life feels obvious to her now: “It does feel like it’s an adventure to sit alongside somebody exploring their world. We don’t know what’s going to come next. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel similar senses of awe at the tenacity of the human spirit. What humans can navigate, and how we can find meaning and healing out of some of the darkest times, blows my mind.” Some of her sessions happen outdoors now: “I love that nature becomes my teammate, and the donkeys are my teammates.”
Listening to Outen now, it’s striking that the oceans themselves almost fade into the background. The crossings were extraordinary, but they were never really the destination. They became the landscape through which she learnt to live with grief, embrace uncertainty and, eventually, exchange relentless endurance for the courage to meet both the world and herself with softness.
King Charles III officially opened the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and unveiled a plaque to commemorate his visit. His Majesty was greeted by the University of Oxford’s Chancellor, Lord William Hague, Vice-Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracey, and Stephen Schwarzman, whose donations funded the £185m building.
During the visit, the King spoke with individuals involved in the building’s construction, academics from the humanities faculties, and community organisations which use the site. He met representatives from the Centre’s Cultural Programme and the Leys Festival, an ongoing collaboration between residents and the Centre to celebrate creativity. A choir of secondary school children from across Oxford performed during the visit.
His visit also included a showcase of historic musical instruments from the University’s Bate Collection, selected by representatives from the Faculty of Music, and a rare Bach manuscript from the Bodleian Library.
In a short speech, the King said it gave him “great pleasure” to celebrate the opening of the building, which brings together the University’s humanities departments under one roof.
Stephen Schwarzman, the philanthropist and businessman after whom the building is named, said: “ Throughout decades of public service, His Majesty King Charles III has been a thoughtful and prescient voice on many of the defining questions of our time, all the while championing dialogue across disciplines, cultures, and generations. It is my hope that the Schwarzman Centre will contribute to this dialogue by advancing scholarship that addresses humanity’s most pressing challenges and fostering global collaboration here in the heart of Oxford.”
Lord Hague said: “It was a privilege to welcome His Majesty The King to mark the opening of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, a moment that celebrates both an extraordinary new addition to Oxford and the enduring importance of the humanities.
“At a time when the world is changing with extraordinary speed, the study of history, languages, philosophy, literature, music and the arts helps us understand who we are, how we have arrived here, and how we might shape the future. This remarkable centre is a powerful statement of confidence in the ability of the humanities to illuminate public life, enrich our culture and equip future generations with the judgement and imagination every society needs.”
The Royal Visit included receptions at Oriel College, which is celebrating its 700th anniversary, and University College.
The Schwarzman was closed for two days as a security measure agreed with Thames Valley Police and the Proctors’ Office. Faculties informed students of the building’s closure to minimise disruption. In an email sent on 25th June, students in all faculties located in the building were told that the Centre would be closed to all staff, students, and the general public for a “VIP Visitor”.
Performance spaces at the Schwarzman Centre have been open since April 2026 for the Cultural Programme, which “aims to welcome audiences and communities into the heart of the research process at Oxford University through public engagement.” The Centre is also home to the Bodleian Humanities Library, as well as seven humanities faculties and research institutes.
Funded through £185 million in donations from Stephen Schwarzman, the Schwarzman Centre is the largest building project the University has undertaken “since the Renaissance”.
Since its announcement, the Centre has been subject to debate about the role of billionaire benefactors within the University. Schwarzman, an American billionaire, is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Blackstone, an investment firm best known for its private equity business. His connections to Republican politicians, including financial support for President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, provoked the formation of the campaign Oxford Against Schwarzman. At the time of his initial donation, an open letter signed by 27 Oxford academics opposed the University’s decision to accept Schwarzman’s philanthropy. Citing a UN report which singled out Blackstone for its contribution to the global housing crisis, the letter stated that the Schwarzman Centre “will be built with the proceeds of the exploitation and disenfranchisement of vulnerable people across the world”.
At the Centre’s opening in 2025, a University spokesperson told Cherwell: “Oxford University has robust and rigorous guidelines regarding the acceptance of donations and research funding … All significant new funders or new gifts or grants from existing funders are reviewed by the Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding (CRDRF) … Those donating money or sponsoring programmes at the University have no influence over how academics carry out their research or what conclusions they reach.”
Somewhere around the fifth week of Michaelmas, it starts. Not with a formal announcement, not with any kind of pastoral guidance — just a creeping anxiety that spreads through staircase WhatsApp groups and over hall dinners, usually introduced by someone who heard from someone in second year that if you haven’t found a house by Christmas, you’re finished.
This is Oxford’s least-discussed rite of passage: the second-year housing scramble. Everybody goes through it. Nobody really prepares you for it. And in the last few years, it has gotten considerably worse.
The queue
In November 2025, students had queued outside a Finders Keepers letting agency for over 48 hours to secure properties for the following academic year. More than a hundred students. Tents. Winter coats at 5am. Forty properties released at 9am on a Tuesday, gone within hours.
It sounds absurd. It isn’t. The queue has become a fixture, notorious enough that the BBC covered it the previous year, when a first-year Brookes student waited 24 hours for a lease. In 2025, the wait had doubled.
According to one Oxford student, she and her prospective housemates had viewed ten properties through another agency the week before. All ten were snapped up before they could attend the viewings.
This is not a fringe experience. It is what finding a house in Oxford now looks like for the majority of students who leave college accommodation after first year.
What nobody tells you at the open day
The college system creates a comfortable illusion. You arrive in October, your room is ready, your battles are paid termly, the heating (mostly) works. For eight weeks you live in a building that has housed students for centuries, and the logistics of accommodation simply do not require your attention.
Then Michaelmas ends. And someone in your year group sends a message that a good house in Cowley Road just went under offer and maybe you should all have a serious conversation about who you want to live with next year.
The pressure this creates — to lock in friendships that are barely twelve weeks old, to commit to people you haven’t yet fallen out with or become inseparable from — is its own particular stress that sits alongside the academic one. “You feel like you’re making decisions about your entire social life for the next two years based on who you happened to sit next to in a freshers’ week dinner,” says Maya, a second-year reading History. “And then simultaneously you have to decide on a neighbourhood, a budget, whether you want to live with five people or three, all before Christmas collections.”
The market they step into
What Oxford students enter when they leave college is one of the most expensive private rental markets in England. According to the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, the average monthly private rent in Oxford reached £1,956 in April 2026 — the highest of any area outside London. In the same period, the weighted average college rent for undergraduates was around £950 per month.
That jump of more than 100% is not a London premium that students have been warned about and can plan around. It is a local market that has quietly become London-adjacent in price while remaining entirely un-London in terms of wages and support structures.
The agencies know this dynamic well. Finders Keepers, the letting agent at the centre of last year’s queue, operates a policy in which viewings are not conducted before leases are signed — at which point students must put down a holding deposit of a week’s rent. One medical student described it as: “effectively a viewing costs £700.” She added: “Just because we need houses as studentsand letting agencies know that, doesn’t mean they should be able to treat us like this.”
The friendship geometry problem
Underneath the financial pressure is something stranger and harder to articulate: the way the scramble reshapes social dynamics in a place where social dynamics are already unusually high-stakes.
Oxford friendships in first year exist in a bubble — the college bubble, specifically. Everyone is fifteen seconds away from everyone else. You eat together, you socialise in the same JCR, you walk past each other’s doors. The question of who you want to live with next year is therefore being answered before you’ve had the chance to experience what spending real, sustained time with these people actually looks like.
“I ended up in a house with people I chose in week six of first year,” says Tom, a third-year classicist. “By the end of second year I was barely speaking to two of them. But you’ve signed a twelve-month lease. So.” He trails off in a way that suggests the rest of that sentence is too long to complete over coffee.
The problem is structural. The scramble happens at exactly the moment when bonds are newest and the pressure to form them is highest. It accelerates decisions that, in any other context, people would take much longer to make. And unlike most decisions made at eighteen, it has a legally binding contract attached.
The medical student exception
A specific subset of Oxford students has it worse: medics in third year, transitioning to clinical placements at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington. College accommodation, for those who have it, is typically in central or north Oxford — geographically useless for early morning hospital starts. So clinical-year students enter the private market not by choice but by necessity, often at the precise moment their academic workload is at its highest.
“This is routinely the year that people find the most challenging, just because of how big of an adjustment it is to be in the hospital,” said one third-year medical student last year, standing in the queue outside Finders Keepers in November. “So, having this looming over my head plus this whole organisational crisis with trying to find a house is not great, and I know that there’s a lot of people in the same boat as well.”
It is hard to think of a worse moment to be spending your evenings on Rightmove.
The quiet divergence
What the scramble reveals, more than anything, is how differently Oxford students experience the same institution depending on a variable almost entirely outside their control: how much accommodation their college offers, and for how many years.
Some colleges guarantee rooms for all three years of an undergraduate degree. Others offer two. Some allocate on ballot; others on financial need. A student at one college may never touch the private market. Their friend at another college down the road may have been in it since second year, navigating twelve-month leases and absent landlords and the particular misery of discovering in October that your new house in East Oxford has no working boiler.
None of this is made legible to students before they choose a college — a choice that, for most undergraduates, happens at seventeen, on the basis of subject suitability and open day impressions. The financial consequences of that choice, compounded over three years in one of England’s most expensive rental markets, can be enormous.
The college system is Oxford’s great strength and, in this specific respect, its great inconsistency. The quality of someone’s housing experience should not be a lottery whose outcome is determined before they have even sat their A-levels. But right now, more often than not, it is.
For most undergraduate composers, a debut album remains a distant ambition. For Christopher Churcher, a music student and finalist at Lady Margaret Hall, it has already become a reality. His album Moonrise, a collection of choral works recorded with Somerville College Choir, has earned national attention, including being selected as BBC Radio 3’s Album of the Week.
The path to Moonrise began long before Oxford. Christopher started composing at the age of ten or eleven, shortly after beginning piano lessons. But rather than sitting down to compose, Christopher’s primary catalyst for writing music was a reluctance to practise scales. Instead of working through assigned exercises, he found himself improvising melodies and chord progressions at the piano. Eventually he began writing those ideas down.
Music entered his life through several different routes. Growing up in Birmingham, he joined Birmingham Cathedral Choir as a child chorister, learning to sight-read and performing music several times a week. Later, after his voice broke, he moved away from singing and towards orchestral performance, taking up the bassoon and playing with youth orchestras. When he arrived at Oxford, he expected his future to lie primarily in orchestral music. Instead, it was choral music that transformed his direction.
That redirection, sparked inside Somerville’s chapel, is the thread that runs in a more or less straight line to Moonrise. The turning point came towards the end of his first year. Christopher attended one of the college’s contemplations, reflective services that combine music, poetry, and readings. Listening to the Somerville College Choir perform, he experienced what he describes as an epiphany.
“I just had this sort of epiphany that I’d been missing choral music from my life for so long,” he recalls. “I realised that that was where I needed to be.” Although he had spent years pursuing orchestral performance, the artistic language that ultimately felt most natural was the one he thought he had left behind. Through Somerville College Choir and its director, Will Dawes, he rediscovered a musical tradition that had shaped him as a child.
That relationship would eventually become the foundation for Moonrise. The choir provided a collaborative environment in which Christopher’s compositional voice could develop, serving as his “most kind of significant collaborators to date” who have “have hugely inspired the way that [he] write[s]”. Looking back, he is clear that the album would never have existed without Oxford. “This album only happened because I was in the right place at the right time with the right choir and the right director”, he says.
Yet Oxford’s influence extends beyond performance opportunities. Christopher speaks of the university as a creative ecosystem whose value lies in its intellectual diversity. Although he studies music, much of the poetry featured on Moonrise came through conversations with friends studying English and modern languages. The degree itself, meanwhile, exposed him to ideas that challenged his assumptions about what composition could be.
While rooted in the choral tradition, Christopher’s music draws inspiration from far beyond the classical canon. He speaks enthusiastically about artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to contemporary popular musicians. Rather than treating classical music as a sealed cultural category, he approaches it as part of a wider musical landscape. Oxford, he says, “removed any sort of prejudices that [he] had internalised from studying GCSE music”.
But, of course, Oxford isn’t all positive for composition. Christopher is careful not to romanticise the experience. “Oxford really gets in the way of composing,” he says bluntly at one point. The Music degree (like any Oxford degree), he explains, leaves little uninterrupted time for sustained creative work. Unlike a conservatoire education, his course does not centre composition itself. Despite this, he views Oxford as a productive tension, rather than a mere obstacle. The demands of the degree may limit the time available for composition, but they also expose him to ideas, texts, and people that continually enrich his creative work. “Whilst sometimes I can feel like I’m fighting against the degree a bit to find time to write and compose”, he reflects, “it’s so great because the degree is so stimulating”. Oxford, in his view, has been a place where academic study and artistic practice constantly inform one another.
The result is a compositional style that balances sophistication with immediacy. His creative process is surprisingly architectural. Before writing notes, he sketches large visual timelines on sheets of A3 paper, mapping emotional trajectories, climaxes, textures, and harmonic developments. He compares the process to designing a building.
Describing his composition process, he says: “I’ll sit there and think, okay, I’ve got five minutes. Where do I want the high point of the piece to be? How can I create a sense of catharsis for the listener?” The language is telling. Even when discussing structure, Christopher returns repeatedly to emotional experience. Composition becomes a carefully planned emotional journey, which leads him to reject the idea that composition is inherently intellectual. Instead, his music is fundamentally personal and autobiographical. “I think actually that does make me quite different to some classical composers”, he says. While some composers prefer distance between their work and their personal lives, he actively embraces vulnerability. His music functions almost as a form of emotional testimony.Nowhere is that clearer than in the third Pride Motet. Christopher says, “I put my heartbreak and my love and my humanity into that piece”.
For Christopher, the goal when composing music is to create music that anyone, regardless of their background in classical music, can listen to and appreciate. Asked how he would describe Moonrise to someone without a classical background, he avoids technical language entirely. Instead, he speaks about emotion. The album, he says, is an attempt “to express human emotion” and to create atmospheres that listeners can inhabit regardless of their musical experience. The words he chooses to describe the music – “warm, comforting, atmospheric, emotional, sensitive” – reveal a composer less concerned with intellectual display than with human connection.
As he prepares for the next stage of his career, including a move to Germany and new commissions for choir and orchestra, that commitment remains unchanged. The success of Moonrise has given him confidence that audiences are responding to the values that matter most to him: emotional truth, accessibility, and connection.
Moonrise emerged from precisely that conviction. Beneath its carefully crafted choral textures and ambitious artistic vision lies a simple idea: that music is at its most powerful when it communicates something real. It is an idea Christopher has cemented in his professional repertoire because of Oxford – because of a choir he wasn’t looking for, a director who became a collaborator, and a degree that left him fighting for time even as it gave him plenty to write about. That belief, and that drive to make music accessible, seems likely to remain at the centre of whatever comes next.
Scenes with Girls deserves to be seen as one of Labyrinth Productions’ (Rosie Morgan-Males and Emily Cullinan) most impressive accolades. It displayed the tension inside a female friendship to such a believable extent that at points the audience were silenced entirely. It felt particularly relevant given this year’s right-wing coverage of an emerging “angry woman” who refuses to conform to established beauty ideals, creating the concern amongst men that she may, horror-of-horrors, renounce them entirely.
The play centres the friendship of flatmates Tosh (Juliet Taub) and Lou (Sanaa Pasha), and their ex-flatmate Fran (Georgina Cooper), and forces the audience to consider what it means to live as a feminist in today’s day and age. Each character symbolises a varying degree of conformity to the standard “narrative” – the conventional life path ascribed to women which lacks space for female platonic intimacy, and foregrounds the pursuit of heteronormative romantic relationships. Lou persistently seeks sex with men, but wishes she could leave her body as it happens, Tosh chooses not to associate with men at all, and Fran becomes the object of their ridicule as she, in their eyes, allows herself to be dominated by her boyfriend.
The play questions whether following the narratives we’re fed makes us flawed. Underlying the flatmates’ attempts to define a new feminist consciousness is a sense of sexual competitiveness written into their psyches since “girls’ school”, and ironically it is Tosh who chooses the “desire to be desired” over forging an alternative lifestyle with Lou, briefly doing a “really good impression of a girlfriend” before the two reunite. This production was remarkable for its ability to use laughter to make the audience think. Lines which were instantly funny, such as Taub begging her boyfriend to repeat himself and him saying “you’re so fit”, prompted reflection on the reality of women allowing men’s assessment of their physical appearance to dictate their happiness. Hearing conversations after the performance’s end made me certain that this production will have an enduring impact on viewers’ understanding of heterosexual romance.
The actors’ versatility prevented the physically intense emotional scenes from losing pace, and Rosie Morgan-Males’ stellar directing allowed the audience to observe when each friend was craving the other’s approval. In such an intimate relationship, tension was physical. Blocking made evident to everyone but Lou that Tosh wanted her undivided attention. Lou’s incessant mentions of sex made Tosh’s shoulders visibly slump, and her dissatisfied expression at times where Lou seemed more focused on her phone gave context to later anger. Later, having been persuaded that she ought to renounce men entirely, Lou is placed behind Tosh so that the audience can notice her hopeful looks as she asserts to Fran that she no longer wants to talk about boys: in a weak imitation of Tosh’s all out separatism, Lou murmurs that she now finds them “gross”.
Cooper as Fran was a comedic highlight, and Morgan-Males’ choice to push her over-enthusiastic reactions to extremity was well enacted. Cooper’s focus was commendable: the audience could see that while constantly smiling, Fran was also constantly listening, never looking away from the relationship between the two women. This made her later assertion that she “is not stupid” and sees herself worthy of pursuing their feminist lifestyle believable.
Pasha too is a fantastic emotional actor and it was in her character’s moments of defeat that she shone most. After Tosh confronts her and explains that she is obsessed by “the shit version of love they [men] give you”, her physicality destabilises and for much of the rest of the play she appears untethered, at one stage collapsing on the floor. The sense that she is struggling to avoid a total breakdown was impressively acted, her eyes glazing with tears as she tells Fran that she feels “mad”.
Taub was impossible not to watch, especially in moments of climactic anger. Her ability to move between a cynical “dead-inside” attitude and brutal anger was phenomenal. In particular, her dogged confrontation of Pasha had the audience visibly uncomfortable.
The embodiment of the joy as well as pain within Tosh and Lou’s platonic relationship was a highlight. No holds-barred descriptions of Tosh’s sex life, in which the men were always viscerally denounced – “the conversational equivalent of a nosebleed in a swimming pool” – were interspersed with tableaus that convincingly represented the pair as two friends placed firmly in our generation. Non-sensical jokes were thrown at each other while sat apart engrossed in their phone screens. In the parts of the script where their friendship was strongest they sprawled their limbs across each other. It was these unspoken moments that made their friendship seem most real: jokingly poking each other’s legs, or wrestling each other to the ground.
The actors’ boldness and commitment to every movement gave the play its glowing quality. Their hugs – most memorably after Tosh demands that Lou “dig into this” – successfully transferred an appearance of platonic passion. Alongside whole-hearted physical intimacy, the toilet at the back of the stage was an effective way to demonstrate the lack of boundaries between the characters. The lack of bodily privacy between the two was reflected in its openness to the audience, with some of the most compelling dialogue delivered by Tosh from the toilet seat. In an extremely powerful exchange taking advantage of this set-up, a visibly defeated Taub asked “am I mentally ill?”.
The “messiness” of the physical intimacy was well complimented by the set, with clothes strewn across the floor. It felt like an illusion to Tracey Emin’s My Bed in an era where women’s lack of total cleanliness is no longer seen as shocking. The simplicity of the costumes (relaxed tops and tracksuits, designed by Clara Woodhead and Mimi Finney) were another indicator of the friend’s closeness.
The script, like female friendships themselves, is complicated, but the actors tackled it with professional quality. It is rare that a student production is capable of making an audience both laugh out loud, and fall completely silent. To use a cliche, it was jaw-dropping.
William Hague, Chancellor of Oxford, conferred nine honorary degrees in today’s Encaenia ceremony. The recipients include former New Zealand Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern; actress and theatre director Adjoa Andoh MBE; and literary critic and host of Finding Your Roots Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The other honorands are tennis player Billie Jean King; electronics engineer and inventor of blue LED Shuji Nakamura; Nobel Prize-winning economics professor Daron Acemoglu; Birmingham Royal Ballet director Carlos Acosta CBE; biochemist Katalin Karikó, whose mRNA research contributed to the COVID-19 vaccines; and former CEO of GSK Dame Emma Walmsley.
The procession of recipients and senior members of the University walked from Exeter College to the Sheldonian Theatre, where the ceremony took place, around 11.20am. Earlier this year, the Chancellor conferred eight honorary degrees in a Special Honorary Degree Ceremony intended to commemorate the beginning of his Chancellorship.
Image credits: Zoë McGuire for Cherwell.
Encaenia takes place on the Wednesday of ninth week of each Trinity term, and sees the conferral of honorary degrees on recipients selected by the Congregation, a body of over 5,000 staff and academics. The University website describes these awards as “the most prestigious awards the University can confer”. The ceremony is traditionally followed by a lunch, hosted by All Souls College for over 100 years, and a garden party. It has been a constant feature in the Oxford calendar since the 1470s.
Dame Jacinda Ardern GNZM is one of the most prominent honorands this year. As the Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she was praised by international media for her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, Ardern joined the Blavatnik School of Government as a member of the World Leaders Circle, alongside former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Adjoa Andoh MBE is another recognisable face among the recipients. An actress from Bristol, she has performed with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In recent years, she has played Lady Danbury in both Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, the latter of which included a wedding scene filmed in Merton College Chapel.
Dame Emma Walmsley DBE is the only recipient to also be an alumna of the University. She studied for an MA in Classics and Modern Languages at Christ Church, later working at L’Oréal. From 2016 to 2025, she was the CEO of GSK, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and is the first woman to lead an international pharmaceutical company.
Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the several Americans awarded today. An academic at Harvard University, he rediscovered the manuscripts of the earliest known African-American novels and is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Professor Gates has also built a successful television career as the host of Finding Your Roots, in which celebrities are presented with their ancestral histories.
Past notable honorands include Nelson Mandela (1996), Dame Judi Dench (2000), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (2001).
Ask any final-year student leaving an exam hall in June where they’re headed next, and London was the obvious answer. Not anymore. More and more Oxford graduates are heading north, and one destination keeps appearing in conversation: Manchester.
The Lure of Manchester
In the capital, rent may eat through a graduate wage before the month is half over, and that is reason enough for plenty of finalists to look elsewhere. Some confess to perusing houses for sale Manchester between revision sessions, imagining a version of adult life where buying a property doesn’t feel like something to fret about a decade from now. There is something softly comforting about that.
Money explains some of the shift, but not all of it. Manchester has spent the last few years creating a reputation that has precious little to do with being “the cheaper option”. Whole areas that were warehouses and factories a generation ago are now filled with studios, independent cafés and small enterprises managed by people who wanted to be there.
And that difference matters. “Many Oxford graduates face a choice between two conflicting instincts: the safer, more prestigious path, or one that lets them build something at their own pace. More and more, Manchester seems to provide a chance to have both: ambition without the relentless financial squeeze.
That same logic extends right into the working world. And that’s where the real appeal begins to emerge.
More than Merely Low-Priced
In recent years, several large businesses in finance, media, and technology have been expanding their northern headquarters, drawn by lower operational costs and a steady supply of graduates from Manchester, Salford, and nearby universities. And for someone coming out of Oxford, it means actual chances, not a safety net.
Ask a graduate eight months into the move, however, and the conversation rarely remains on salary for long. It tends to stray towards the gig they went to last Friday, the five-a-side team they joined within weeks of arriving, and the speed at which the city stopped seeming strange. Manchester has a knack of making people feel at home quickly; its music scene, its football culture, and its directness with strangers all seem to help with that.
What’s striking is how rarely the move seems like settling. Most graduates say it’s quite the opposite: evidence that a strong career and a manageable, pleasurable life don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
That is not to say Oxford has lost its allure or that London is not a sensible option. What has changed is that graduates now have a real choice where career and quality of life are not at opposite ends of a trade-off. That’s just the kind of start that an increasing number of finalists are looking for, and Manchester is where more often than not they are choosing to get it.
I must admit I don’t have much love for musical theatre – not in a holier-than-thee (not thou) sort of way, as I assure you I have significantly less love for opera – but simply on the basis that I am a great lover of stories, and I find that songs are usually an obstacle to the momentum of an unfolding plot. So, when reading this review, bear in mind that as a story-loving, musical-hating, easily-bored theatre-goer, I am quite possibly the worst person in the world to review this play.
The Moro Affair is an original musical, whose script and songs were, to my great admiration, written entirely by Magdalen College’s Alex Rawnsley. When asked for a summary of the play’s plot, Rawnsley told me: “This play is based on a real event which happened in 1978 where the former Italian Prime Minister, who was the most powerful politician in Italy at the time, gets abducted in broad daylight, and the government just… does nothing. And so it’s a story about how all the different facets of Italian society reacted to that, how it progressed, and whether or not they were successful in rescuing him, basically. That is to give the quickest possible summary of what is quite a complicated plot.”
Rawnsley wrote the script and all the music for it, which I find very impressive. The play was clearly crafted with love, and it showed in how professional it felt. The acting was superb across the board, with Harriet Wilson’s Pope as a standout, and Rosie Sutton’s direction was flawless. Frankly, everything about the production was great, contributing to the aforementioned feeling of professionalism (excepting some dismal lighting in one scene). The songs were funny and well-written, and again very impressive given Alex is a mere student (and a medicine student at that), but admittedly not very catchy – though I may just be a simpleton for wanting them to be. I was impressed, through and through.
But to criticise the play a bit, as is my job, I’ll admit I found it a little boring. It didn’t feel much like a story, on account of the fact the characters kept changing: it was the same 6 actors throughout, but they rotated through an endless rota of NPCs to tell vignette-style anecdotes. And whilst they often returned to their ‘main’ characters, I found it difficult to tell, as nothing about their outfits or composure changed, and they were in any case more like dancing exposition machines than 3-dimensional people. Frankly, the play sometimes felt like a singing history textbook. There was a scene where Moro’s wife and daughter have an argument, which was written very well (and performed superbly by Sophia Lee and Emma Hamilton), but I struggled to feel engaged, as I had never seen these characters interact before in my life.
But whilst I may seem harsh in this criticism, I only do so because of how impressed I was by what I saw overall, and how optimistic I am that Rawnsley and this same team could, with a little extra polish, create something truly special – maybe even a musical classic which gay dramakids will be singing about for years to come. Like Wicked, but good. But then again, what do I know? I don’t like musicals.
A private members’ club audacious enough to promote itself as the “last bastion of free speech”, the Oxford Union is the embodiment of Oxford exclusivity and elitism. Founded by a group of young white men in 1823, the Union’s self-professed object is to encourage rigorous debate, often about some of the most controversial topics of the moment. It occupies a bizarre space between the University and the public, affiliated to neither and mediating between both.
Though times have changed since the founding of the Union, its atmosphere and attitude remain outdated. Yes, there have been recent statements of the Union’s commitment to inclusion – such as its 2022 Policy on Equality, Diversity, Accessibility and Inclusion, which outlines the Union’s aim “to be an open, diverse, accessible and inclusive society in which all who meet the criteria for membership feel welcome irrespective of their legally protected characteristics or socio-economic background”. But words on a page can only do so much to eradicate a culture which has been compounding itself for 200 years, what with its extensive list of alumni Prime Ministers, mostly men, mostly white. Whatever provisions may be in place, the fact of the matter is the reputation and culture that are recognised as part and parcel of the Union. The stereotypes do the work of keeping underprivileged and underrepresented students well away, and discounted lifetime membership is by no means a panacea to this issue.
The image persists of the card-carrying Union member as a rich, self-righteous white man, waving the flag of free speech with a hand adorned in signet rings. But, in fairness, as part of their accessibility plan, the Oxford Union Society’s discounted membership for those from underprivileged economic backgrounds does max out at £137 off the full-priced lifetime membership, which currently stands at a hefty £343. As an independent society that receives no University funding, it is understandable that membership fees play a necessary role in sustaining its buildings, events, and speaker programme. However, despite these initiatives, the price of membership at all begs the question: how far can anyone be said to represent the virtue of free speech if this “free” speech is locked behind a paywall? Especially given the funds the Union is consistently able to raise through private room hire, social events, and termly balls. The numbers don’t matter, it’s the principle. This pompous attitude of self-aggrandisement is what many of us see behind the slogans, hacks, and prestige.
Even the concept of lifetime membership alone is enough to deter some from feeling that they have a place at the Union. Who is a lifetime membership really for? Lowly undergraduates who will return to the site of the Union for the sheer love of debate? Or is it for those students who go on to be the Boris Johnsons, Tony Blairs, or even the W. H. Audens of the future? Policymakers, famous faces, the rich. People who the Union can thrust forward as part of their longstanding historical tradition of prestige. Or, perhaps it is for those residential members, a token gesture to people who actually live in Oxfordshire but aren’t Oxford University students. But don’t be fooled, this isn’t a heart-warming gesture of solidarity with the general public. In the Union’s words, “Any person resident in or near Oxford whose admission would, in the opinion of the Standing Committee, benefit the Society, shall be eligible for election as a Residential Member”. However, to put it more bluntly, these memberships have to be approved, candidates have to be interviewed, and the number of residential memberships is capped annually at 100.
I found all the information here whilst reading through the Union’s 228 page rule document. Some of my favourite rules include Rule 5 (b), which orders that “Membership Cards shall remain the property of the Society”, and “All Members shall carry the Society’s Membership Card or other approved proof of their membership on their person whilst in the Society’s Buildings”. Another is Standing Order E3 (e), which reads “No poster or notice which is not an official Union publication shall be affixed to any wall, window, door, or similar structure in the Society’s Buildings, except with express permission of the President”. Ah, free speech.
Whilst lingering on this topic of free speech, it might be worth considering who this free speech was originally for. The Oxford Union was founded in 1823, nine years before the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the British franchise to middle-class, propertied men. 1935 marked the year in which women obtained “Third Class membership” to the Oxford Union, allowing them the generous privilege of coming to the Union for tea if they so desired. It wouldn’t be until 1963 that there was a woman who was a full member of the Oxford Union, namely Judith Okely, who went on to become an anthropologist. However, there were notable examples of Union women who served careers in public office, such as former Union president Benazir Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister, and the Union’s first female Asian president. Recent presidents and officers have come from a broad range of backgrounds, including the current Oxford Union president, Arwa Elrayess, who has made history herself by being the first Palestinian, first Algerian, and first Arab woman to be president. While these are excellent, positive strides forward for the institution, they beg the question: why are such things still news in 2026? The Oxford Union itself was quite literally not built for most of us. And it seems to me that it is not for most of us still.
Whoever has been most unfortunate enough to encounter Union hacks barricading St Michael’s Street before elections will have surely noted both the demographic, and attitude, of the members representing the Union to University students. A friend of mine was passing down this street when one such member accosted her, questioning what she was even doing on St Michael’s if she wasn’t going to the Union. Still furthering this atmosphere of exclusivity and elitism is the sort of gated community the Oxford Union buildings themselves impress – with parties continuing well into the morning, blaring music, members making a raucous that can only be heard and not seen behind the tall barred gates. And so this idea persists, then, of the Oxford Union as loud, unabashed, and self-important, supposedly contained within its own four walls yet leaking out into Oxford society at large.
In quite stark contrast to this is the Oxford Students’ Union, an institution which is frequently misconceived as one and the same as The Oxford Union Society. One might be forgiven for this mistake, granted the national media coverage of the Oxford Union, or even the inclusion of ‘Union’ in its title. While the Oxford Union’s purpose is to provide a forum for debate and discussion rather than to act as a representative body for students, even official bodies like Wadham Student Union are quick to iron out the popular misconception between the two institutions in the first sentence of their ‘short guide’ to the University-wide SU. Likewise, at the top of the Oxford University Student Union Wikipedia page, in italics it reads “Not to be confused with Oxford Union”, with a link to the debating society’s own page. This begs the question: are we, as Oxford University students, united by the Oxford Union? It seems quite obvious that one of these Unions is not quite as interested in the University’s students as the other.
This contrast can be summed up quite neatly by comparing the opening sentences of each institution’s ‘About Us’ section of their website. The Students’ Union proposes a clear aim of working for and in the interests of Oxford University students: “We exist to represent students’ academic interests, not just for better outcomes, but for a better, more equitable University experience”. The Oxford Union, on the other hand, introduces itself as “the world’s most prestigious debating society with a tradition of hosting internationally prominent individuals across politics, academia, and popular culture”. Perhaps it would be more fitting for the Oxford Union Society to drop the ‘Union’ from its title. I think ‘The Oxford Society’ gives an accurate enough depiction – although only if we are understanding ‘society’ in the Edwardian sense.
A pompous culture rooted in a history of exclusivity, whiteness, maleness, and richness keeps many at arm’s length from the Oxford Union. Locked behind a membership, distinct from both the University and from the public, it begs the question: who is the Union for? The answer, for now, can only be: for itself.
