Carry on along the High Street, passing Logic Lane on your left, and you come to University College. It was here that the young C.S. Lewis arrived on April 26, 1917 to begin his academic studies as an undergraduate.

His rooms were on staircase XII, Room 5 of the Radcliffe Quad. When the young Lewis interrupted his studies to join the army, he had the good fortune to stay in Oxford and train at Keble College. He often would return to University College (known as ‘Univ.’) for weekends.

C.S. Lewis in a letter of July, 1917:
‘You can’t imagine how I have come to love Univ., especially since I left. Last Saturday evening when I was sleeping alone, I spent a long time wandering over it, into all sorts of parts where I had never been before, where the mullioned windows are dark with ivy that no one has bothered to cut since the war emptied the rooms they belong to.’

Lewis was to take a double first in Literae Humaniores (more commonly known as ‘Classics’); he completed his studies with a first in English in 1923.

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Founded in 1249, University College is the oldest of Oxford’s colleges — though Merton and Balliol might dispute the title.

When Lewis first arrived here in April 1917, he was a shy 18-year-old Irishman with a suitcase, a head full of myths, and no friends in England.

His time as an undergraduate was brief and turbulent; by the autumn, he was in military training, soon to be sent to the front in France.

Yet Oxford — and Univ. in particular — would leave a permanent mark on him.

He returned after the war to complete his degree, walking the same ivy-covered quads with a quieter, more contemplative heart.

Here, his love of classical learning deepened, shaping his lifelong belief that education was not merely about information, but formation.

The college still holds records of Lewis’s rooms and marks his presence with quiet pride. If you pause by the gate, you may hear echoes of that young man discovering both the splendour and the strangeness of Oxford for the first time.

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