It’s no secret that Oxford can be a phenomenally expensive place. Even if you’re not paying student fees, converting any other currency to sterling can magically diminish your travel funds. What is less well known is that some of the best things in Oxford are free.

Take the Pitt Rivers Museum. Tucked in behind the Oxford Museum of Natural History, this collection of ethnographic and archaeological artefacts is one of the most entertaining places in the city. Inside the darkened galleries you are greeted by an ordered jumble of wonderfully obscure objects. In the attic-like collection hides something for all tastes, from shrunken heads to drug paraphernalia and from amulets to firearms. The displays are arranged by type rather than place of origin, and they’ll lend you a wind-up torch to peek into the crowded cases and drawers. There are few richer places to spend a rainy afternoon, and there are plenty of those in Oxford.

And then there’s the Ashmolean, which dates back the somewhat shocking distance to 1677. This makes it the oldest university museum in the world, and it’s a pleasantly civilised place, all Ionic columns on the outside, and with a fairly impressive collection including works by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.

Oxford isn’t famous for museums, though. It is colleges you come to see, though many of the smaller ones are closed to non-students and the more famous ones feel justified in charging substantial entrance fees to the obedient crowds. Worcester College, however, doesn’t. It’s a quiet college, despite its size, and the grounds are a lovely place to stroll: there’s a small lake and an orchard as well as an impressive playing field behind the crumbling walls. Originally lacking the funds of colleges like Magdalen and Christchurch to re-build older buildings, Worcester’s architecture is a mix of styles, ranging from medieval cottages to thoroughly modern and currently under construction, and passing through everything in between. In a way, Worcester is a museum of Oxford architecture, and no less telling of the city’s past than the Pitt Rivers or the Ashmolean museums.