Oxford is where you want to arrive late morning, when the commuters have settled and the tourists have not quite taken over the pavements.
Be honest with yourself about the riding, though: it is a city. The ring road is quick but busy, the centre is a thicket of bus lanes, bollards and one-way streets, and parking for a motorcycle takes a little planning. The reward for the effort is that you can leave the machine and walk. The Cherwell and the Thames, which Oxford calls the Isis for part of its length, both slip through the town, and a short stroll takes you to meadows, punts and willow trees that feel miles from the traffic.
The university is the obvious story, with its first teaching recorded in the eleventh century and colleges added over the next several hundred years, but Oxford has another identity out in Cowley, a few kilometres east. That is where William Morris built cars in the early twentieth century, and the Mini is still made there today. The city sits between two worlds, scholars on one side and engineers on the other, and it is a rare place where you can see a medieval quad and a car plant in one afternoon.
Fuel is no problem anywhere around the edge of town, and the best advice is to fill up before you come in rather than hunt for a station among the one-way systems. Coffee is everywhere, from tiny independent counters to the covered market stalls. When you are ready to leave, the Cotswold edge begins within half an hour to the west and north, and that is where the riding turns lovely again: stone villages, rolling lanes and the kind of gentle hills that make a rider forget the traffic. Come on a weekday morning if you can, and leave before the school run.