Westgate College

Fragments of the history of Westgate, the Greyfriars, and Paradise were borrowed from real life, but nothing should be taken as fact without doing your own research into the real history of Paradise St. and the real Grayfriars. It is pretty fascinating. See below.


Westgate College is, however, a completely fictional location, it is not actually affiliated with Oxford University in any way. It was created merely as a plot device for a murder mystery.


Any nefarious shenanigans at Westgate College or among its alumni are purely fictional and not representative of the fine upstanding institution that is Oxford University.


Oxford is just a favourite city of the author. Oxford’s illustrious achievements in the arena of Physics made it a perfect backdrop for a pretend location involving a fictional shady physicist and a new theory of quantum gravity.


Any similarity between the characters at Westgate College and any persons living or dead is highly unlikely and would be a most bizarre coincidence.

A detail from a map of Oxford, with South at the top, after Ralph Agas’ 1578 survey (originally etched by Augustine Ryther in 1588). This version by Joseph Skelton published in Oxonia Antiqua Restaurata 1823.







https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1935-0413-248

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International 

(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Note Christ Church College on the left (prior to Sir Christopher Wren’s ’Tom Tower’ being added, 1681-2), The Castle is on the lower right.

Paradise is shown just above (to the South of) The Castle.

Westgate (Weaste Gate) is shown between Paradise and The Castle.

The Greyfriars (Graie Friers) location is shown top left of the frame. This is also noted as Blackfriars on other maps. The Greyfriars also occupied the long, thin building seen top left of Paradise, next to the river.


In medieval monastic contexts, a paradisus usually referred to an enclosed garden—partly practical (for food, herbs, medicinal plants) and partly contemplative (for prayer, walking, and study). The Greyfriars’ “Paradise” at Oxford was also a burial ground.

An overlay of modern Oxford on the Agas map shows where the real Westgate Shopping Centre is now (in orange), and where the site of Westgate College would be if it was actually real in any way (in green).

A detail from a map by Wenceslaus Hollar circa 1643 showing the Blackfriars (Blacke Friers) and Greyfriars (Graye Friers), with the latter much closer to Paradise; the site of the fictitious Westgate College.


Published in Oxoniensia 2014, (c) Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society. https://oxoniensia.org/volumes/2014/Hawkins.pdf