Late Opening
(Plus weekend opening, last post and useful closing times)
It's hard to find concrete information on this important topic, since as you might expect, the meaning of "open late" tends to hinge upon the number of customers coming in at the time. Establishments specifying a closing time of 11 or 11.30pm on Fridays and Saturdays may close half an hour earlier on other days. Al-Shami on Walton Crescent are open until midnight, and the Hi-Lo Jamaican Eating House on the Cowley Road does entirely what it feels like. You will be able to get a meal at an Indian restaurant on the Cowley Road up to at least 11pm; the Rice Box (chinese) is open until midnight seven days a week. If you're after a snack, G&D's (Little Clarendon Street/St Aldates) serve pizza bagels, ice cream and more until midnight nightly. On top of that, clubbers and other creatures of the night will be able to find sustenance until 2am at one of Oxford's venerable kebab-vending vehicles. Details here.
In addition, the Kebab Kid, 146 Cowley Road, is open until 4am daily, Spice Village, 266 Cowley Road, until 3am, and KFC, 142 Cowley Road, is open until 2am on Friday and Saturday. We do not suggest any particular course of action, merely provide the information. But if you can wait until breakfast....
Wheatley service station (just off the Oxford-Aylesbury road and the M40, two miles east of Wheatley - approach by the A40 from Headington) are open 24 hours.
For situations of desperate nighttime need, there are:
...listed with those nearest the centre first:
A fuller list can be found here, but for starters:
A few other pharmacies open outside normal working hours. Click here for the NHS page on which you can search for details.
The Co-op is probably Oxford's most widespread smaller supermarket, having branches in Botley, Rose Hill, Marston and Cowley as well as the more central locations listed below. Many branches are open until 10pm every day. The bigger, later supermarkets tend to be a little out of town (accessible via the ring road).
royalmail.com won't tell us much about this, effectively suggesting that we go round and look at all the post boxes. So, to an extent, we did. The following is a list of last weekday collection times in various key locations (Saturday collections from most of these will be 12 noon, and from October 2007 there are no Sunday or Bank Holiday collections at all in Oxford):
Please do let us know comparable details from where you are.
If you have missed all possible collections, you may present your item at the Oxford Mail Centre, Oxford Business Park North, Alec Issigonis Way (Map: G7). They will allow you to leave it, though whether it gets processed before the following day is entirely at the discretion of the shift manager. How late this happy result might be able to happen is a mystery about which the chap on the phone was not willing to commit himself, especially while there's a strike on (this happens quite often in Oxford). He was extremely reluctant to even discuss the topic, which he claimed was outside his remit, to the extent that one assumes he was itching to get back to a game of cricket in the back yard.
Posting things of different sizes and weights also got more complicated in 2007. To speedily discover the right postage for your package, why not use the Royal Mail's pricefinder, here.
Post Office Opening Times:
Click here for a frighteningly comprehensive guide to the addresses and opening times of Post Offices in Oxfordshire.
Locksmiths, emergency glaziers, etc.
The following glaziers are available for 24 hr call-out 365 days a year:
Likewise locksmiths are positively falling over themselves to offer you out-of-hours services. Many of those listed in Yellow Pages are large nameless companies with a local subsection. A few independent local firms are:
Please note that when locked out of your house at midnight you may not have easy access to the internet, so we advise making some sort of small wallet- or purse-based note at this stage.
