Last Updated on May 3, 2025 by Iain
🌸 Oxford May Day Morning – A Celebration Like No Other
“Now the bright morning-star, Day’s harbinger, / Comes dancing from the East…”— John Milton, L’Allegro
📸 Introduction: A Morning Like No Other
Before the bells ring and the choir sings, before the sun has quite tipped over the dreaming spires, something ancient stirs in Oxford.
It’s Oxford May Day Morning — a collision of music, myth, misrule and misty breath in the cold dawn air.
This year, I was there again — camera charged, coffee in hand, and heart quietly thudding with the sense that this is no ordinary morning.
From Magdalen Bridge to Broad Street, students in gowns, dancers in ribbons, and early risers of all ages gather in gentle defiance of sleep.
Watch Oxford’s Sol Samba Drum & Dance welcoming the sun.
A ritual of drum, dance, and rising light that needs no commentary.
Oxford does May Day like nowhere else: sacred and silly, choral and chaotic.
It’s a city that wakes not with alarm clocks, but with hymns from a tower and Morris bells in the streets.
🔔 From the Tower: The Magdalen College Choir at Dawn
Every year at precisely 6 a.m., a hush falls over the expectant crowd on Magdalen Bridge. Phones are raised, scarves pulled tight, and somewhere in the dark just before dawn, a sense of reverence settles — not religious exactly, but something ancient and shared.
Then, through the mist and the chill, the choir of Magdalen College begins to sing.
Their voices drift down from the top of Magdalen College Tower – Now is the Month of Maying
The tradition is older than the English Reformation, older than the United States, older even than the English Civil War that once shook this city’s foundations.
It’s a moment out of time.
You stand among thousands, but it feels intimate. Just breath, birdsong, and that vibrant unspooling of choral harmony above the trees.
For many, this is the heart of May Day in Oxford. Not the dancing or the revelry, but this – a city pausing to listen, together.
🎻 Bells, Ribbons and What I Didn’t See
Tradition says that where there’s May Morning in Oxford, there are Morris dancers — leaping through Radcliffe Square, bells on boots, handkerchiefs flying. But not this year. Not for me.
Although Jack In The Green walked passed me on The High…
Whether I missed them by minutes, or they were dancing in some hidden courtyard off Cornmarket, I couldn’t say.
What I did find was the same spirit: musicians tucked into corners, spontaneous jigs outside cafés, and costumed wanderers with that unmistakable air of “Oxford knows something you don’t.”
Perhaps that’s part of the magic — no two May Mornings are quite the same.
One year it’s a drum circle by the Sheldonian, the next it’s a jazz trio outside the Turf.
This time, the dancing lived in the crowd itself: students spinning each other in tipsy joy, toddlers stomping in time to buskers, an elderly couple swaying to a tune only they could hear.
And maybe — just maybe — the Morris dancers were watching, too.
🥁 Sol Samba and the Rhythm of the High
As the last notes of the choir dissolved into the early morning air, a different kind of music took hold — deeper, louder, and impossible to ignore.
Like a pulse rising through the cobbles, the sound of Sol Samba rolled down Oxford’s High Street.
Drums. So many drums. Layered rhythms that hit the chest as much as the ears — irresistible, joyful, and utterly alive.
The crowd began to move, not in a rush, but in a slow, swaying tide.
From Magdalen Bridge up towards the University Church and the Radcliffe Camera, people danced, laughed, filmed, and followed the beat like pilgrims chasing a promise of breakfast.
Sol Samba are veterans of Oxford’s May Morning, and their presence changes the mood completely: from reflective to raucous, from awe to celebration.
If the choir lifts the soul, these drums wake the body.
This is May Morning as street theatre — spontaneous, shared, and utterly unrepeatable.
🍻 A 7 a.m. Pint in The Bear
By seven o’clock, the holy music had faded, the samba rhythms had turned a corner, and I found myself — as many do — in The Bear Inn, pint in hand, daylight still feeling like a rumour.
The Bear is Oxford’s oldest pub, its low beams and cut off ties crowding the ceilings and walls like sleepy guardians of tradition.
It’s been here since the 13th century, which means it’s seen more May Mornings than anyone alive.
I didn’t plan to drink that early. No one ever plans it.
But there’s something about stepping from the chill of the street into the warm fug of The Bear – where strangers clink glasses and a man in a tailcoat is singing sea shanties with a Morris dancer (or perhaps just a bloke in a waistcoat, it was hard to tell).
At the table next to me, three students were celebrating the end of their all-nighter with pints of Guinness and packets of crisps.
One wore a ballgown and trainers. Another had a daisy crown and no voice left at all.
That’s an Oxford May Day Morning for you. Timeless and slightly tipsy. Ancient and oddly comforting.
The kind of morning that ends with a beer and a breakfast roll — and somehow, that makes perfect sense.
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, / She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…”— Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis
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