May Morning 2026 — first-hand notes
It's quarter to five on the first of May, and Magpie Lane is already moving. Pairs and small groups, hoods up against the cold, voices low — all heading the same way through the dark colleges toward a tower they can't yet see. By six, fifteen thousand of them will be packed onto the High Street, looking up.
Walking down before dawn
Walking down through the central colleges before five is its own thing — not a crowd yet, but a slow drift of people heading the same way, voices low, the whole city tilting eastward. We took the Catte Street route under the Bridge of Sighs, then along curving New College Lane and Queen's Lane until it spilled us onto the High opposite Queen's College, with Magdalen Tower just a few hundred yards away.
2026 was an unseasonably warm spring — by mid-morning it would be t-shirt weather — but at five it was still nippy enough to want a jacket. Plenty of people coming off the all-night college balls were dressed for the night before rather than the hour: black tie under coats, ball gowns under wool. Sunrise wasn't until 5:36, so the streetlights were still on as we walked.
The other approaches funnel people the same way: down Catte Street past the Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera and onto the High, or Magpie Lane cutting through to the corner opposite Magdalen. By the time you reach the Eastgate Hotel the trickle has thickened. Police on the bridge are politely turning back the last few cyclists. The bridge itself is closed to traffic from about 4:30 a.m. — a quiet, almost ceremonial closure that lets the crowd take it over.
The singing
The crowd built sharply from about 5:30 a.m. along the High Street west of Magdalen Bridge. By the singing, the queue of bodies stretched back well past Queen's Lane — visibly bigger than the most recent years, helped by the holiday landing on a Friday and a clean, dry forecast.
The form is the same every year, and that's most of the appeal. At six o'clock sharp, by Magdalen's own clock, the choir of Magdalen College — sixteen choristers and twelve clerks in white surplices — assembles on the top of the Great Tower. The bells stop. The crowd, by long convention, falls quiet — and it really did, all the way back past Queen's Lane. Then, from 144 feet up, the Hymnus Eucharisticus — a Latin hymn composed for Magdalen by Benjamin Rogers in the 1660s and sung from the tower every May Morning since at least the early eighteenth century. It lasts barely a minute and a half. From the back of the crowd it's a thin thread of sound; from under the tower it's startling.
What follows is a short set of madrigals and lighter pieces — Thomas Morley's Now Is the Month of Maying is the traditional anchor. The choir then closed the 2026 set with Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which was the morning's crowd-pleaser.
Sunrise had broken at 5:36, well before the singing started, so by the time the choir began at six the High Street was already in full daylight — no rain, no wind, and the kind of clear dawn that pulls bigger numbers. The sun was up the whole way through.
Sol Samba kicks it off
The drums start the moment the singing ends. Sol Samba — the Oxford-based Brazilian percussion band, formed in 1999 and a May Morning fixture for over twenty years — assembles at the Longwall Street corner before six and begins the procession up the High Street as the choir on the tower finishes. It is the loudest single moment of the morning — drums, whistles, red and yellow kit pushing through the crowd, and the mood flips from quiet to celebratory in the space of a few bars.
They wind through Radcliffe Square and on toward Broad Street, picking up a tail of followers — a parade as much as a band. If you miss the singing, the samba is the next-best anchor: easy to find by ear from anywhere in the centre.
Morris sides through the morning
Morris sides took up positions around the central colleges through the early morning, with crowds gathered three-deep around each set. The exact sides and their schedule for the day weren't posted in any single place I could find — they appear, dance for fifteen minutes, and move on. Worth wandering a half-mile loop through Radcliffe Square, Broad Street and Cornmarket if you want to see more than one.
Coffee and the small details
Coffee vendors set up early along the bridge and on Broad Street. We picked up a sample from Colombia Coffee Roasters with a small printed card reading "May you feel motivated and clear".
Hot pastries went fast; KNEAD on the Covered Market side was queued out the door by seven.
By eight the formal crowd had broken up entirely. People in formal wear from the all-night college balls were in the cafes, blackened ribbons and champagne flutes tucked under their arms.
Crowd size for 2026
The official 2026 figure will be published by Oxford City Council in the days following the event. For context, the recent run is roughly 27,000 (2017), 12,500 (2022), 16,500 (2024) — see the crowd-size table on the main page. From the High Street, the 2026 turnout looked comfortably above the 2022 figure.
This page will update once the council publishes its number.
Photographs and notes from the High Street, Magdalen Bridge and central colleges, 1 May 2026.