Nobody walks into these places casually. The stone is older than anything else you’ll touch that day, and it makes you feel small at the gate, which is not the insult it sounds like. A door is unlocked at the hour it has always been unlocked. A bell rings and nobody looks up. Then the morning begins the way it has for everyone who ever sat where you are about to sit. But the stone was never the point. The point was always the hours. The reading, the walking, the arguing, the long habit of paying attention.

Sixty-three watercolor-inspired illustrations keep to a single day across Oxford and Cambridge, dawn to lights out. It opens in fog and on water, in the hour when the porters and the crews are the only ones awake. It comes up into stone and sunlight and then goes indoors, to the reading rooms, the lecture benches, the tutorial hour where one person reads aloud and one person listens, the entire system reduced to two armchairs. By midday it’s the oars put back wet, a hand trailed over the side of a boat. Weather comes through and clears. The light goes long. Then evening comes in warm and pulls everyone inside, lamplight and pints and a chapel window bright against the dark, until there is nothing left of the day but one lit room high up and two people walking home beneath it. The palette runs on honey limestone and cool violet shadow, luminous lawn green and grey lead roofs, with one recurring note of crimson in a scarf or a book cloth.

For publishers and stationery designers, editorial and travel publications, hospitality brands and boutique hotels in university towns, bookshops and literary brands, wedding designers, and anyone whose work touches learning, ambition, or the week a school year begins. Dreaming Spires stands on its own. Set beside London Calling it is the university town to the capital, and By Rail is how you would get there. One frame will carry a cover. The reading rooms will hold a wall. The full set will take a brand from the first bell to the last lamp.