A spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker.
On a sunny day last week, I take advantage of the weather to embark on a walk along a stretch of the River Cherwell suggested by my friend Bea. Starting…
The undergraduates had been intending to spend the day playing cricket, tennis or on the river rowing. But such was Ruskin’s power of persuasion that he convinced them to not only attend his lecture instead, (he was one of those rare academics who could fill a lecture theatre at 9 a.m.) but to sign up for a project that he believed would put their physical prowess to more purposeful use. Building a road.
The snake’s head fritillary has something of an iconic status in Oxford. It’s our county flower. And at this time of year locals race to be the first to spot…
Josiah Pullen liked to walk. Believing the exercise helped him stay ‘vigorous and healthy’, he made the same journey every day for 57 years. Sometimes both in the morning and evening.
Peter Forbes, has been setting up at Gloucester Green market since six thirty in the morning when I arrive at nine. You can’t miss him. “I’ve got the best pitch,” he grins from behind his peaked baseball hat. “I get to choose because I’ve been here the longest. When people come round the corner from George St, I’m the first stall they see – all these shiny things.”
Painted during three intensive periods over a period of 25 years, to those who live in the city they are instantly familiar snapshots, illustrated vignettes that cleverly capture that sense of surprise that many of us feel at the sight of a soaring medieval spire over a modern rooftop, or a field of meadow flowers glimpsed through the railings of a bus busy high street.
This was ‘real tennis’, played with a net that sags in the middle, on a funky inside court to a complicated but intriguing set of rules more akin to a game of ‘quidditch’ than that played on the lawns of Wimbledon. And although today I am heading to the one surviving court in the city, it seems the game is still alive and kicking.
Firm believers in art made for public spaces, they were also keen that their work was accessible, sensory, tactile, carving the polysterene moulds by hand using household tools like potato peelers and nutmeg graters to produce a variety of concrete finishes.
Every so often while out walking I will come across something or somebody that takes me by surprise. Stops me in my tracks. And so it is on my regular route to the University Parks when I encounter Dan Arnold and Trigger.
They are hidden all over Oxford and beyond. Outside, amongst the trees of parks and gardens, positioned in courtyards and parking lots. Huge ancient, crowned heads, features blackened with time, hair interlaced with lichen, lips softened by moss, some so weathered it is hard to see there ever was a face shaped out of the blocks of stone.