IT has produced nine Nobel Prize winners since 1900 and currently has a student population of some 130,000.

In many ways, Oxford's new Polish partner is the perfect twin for the City of Dreaming Spires.

Wroclaw – pronounced ‘vrots-wahf’ – is the largest city in western Poland, yet it has only been part of the country since border changes following the Second World War.

Before 1945, Wroclaw had been the German city of Breslau, but following the Nazi defeat almost the entire German population left, replaced by a huge influx of Poles.

Oxford City Council started looking for its next twin city last year, asking residents to nominate potential places in a bid to build ever-stronger international links in the post-Brexit world.

After settling on the 'dynamic' university town, councillor John Tanner and a council officer travelled to Wroclaw earlier this month to agree an outline for a formal partnership with the chairman of Wroclaw city council Jacek Ossowski.

Mr Tanner said: “The city council decided after the Brexit vote that whatever was happened nationally we wanted to keep Oxford an international city so we wanted more twinning links.

“We realised we had not got a link in the east of the EU. We looked at Latvia and Bulgaria and others and it became obvious that the biggest single group [of Eastern Europeans] who live in Oxford are from Poland.

“Obviously they came from lots of different places and we looked at all kinds of cities, but what appeals about Wroclaw is that it’s an established university city but has not got a twin city in the UK.”

Wroclaw was designated the European Capital of Culture by the European Union for 2016.

For football fans, the city hosted three group games at the Euro 2012 championships, which were held in Poland and Ukraine.

Last year it hosted the World Games.

Mr Tanner said it was still unclear how long it would take to formalise an official partnership between Oxford and Wroclaw.

He said: “We’ve had the first date but haven’t had the marriage. Sometimes [twinning] can be a whirlwind romance, sometimes it takes a little longer.”

He also revealed that the city council is seeking to formalise new links with the Italian city Padua, which is home to the world’s fifth oldest university and has existing ties to Oxford University.

The oldest is the world is in Bologna, also in Italy, Oxford is the second and the third is Salamanca in Spain. Cambridge is the fourth oldest.

Of Oxford’s twin cities, Leiden in Holland was twinned in 1946 and Bonn in Germany followed a year later.

León, Nicaragua’s former capital and second largest city, has been twinned with Oxford since 1986.

Cultural links with the French city Grenoble, meanwhile, were first fostered in 1989, while Perm in Russia was formally twinned in 1995.