A spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker.
This past week there’s definitely been an early morning nip in the air. The sun is lower in the sky, the leaves are turning, and the nights are closing in.…
Mary Whitehead is kneeling in front of a part buried gravestone thick with yellow lichen when she calls me over to take a look. We are in the churchyard of the 12th century St Michael and All Angels Church in Fringford, just north of Bicester, and the decorative carving on the stone’s crown as well as its positioning on the main pathway tells her that this might be one of the oldest here. Carefully she takes her trowel and pulls back the inch or so of turf that has grown up around it.
Arriving in England from Southern Italy in 1960 to take up positions in domestic service, they were always going to grow their own – it was what you did back home. And over the years, they have cultivated everything from peas, parsnips, and pumpkins to chicory, chard, carrots and cucumbers, beetroot, borlotti beans and purple sprouting broccoli. They may no longer have the bend in their bodies to put in the hours they once did, but with no garden at home this is still their favourite spot, where they like to come to get out of the house. The place in which they have produced such abundance is where they feel most happy.
I am staring at a vast map on the wall of the cavernous Blackwell Hall in the Weston Library, a stone’s throw from the centre of Oxford. How I could have missed this huge hanging in the hundreds of times I have walked in this space I have no idea. But today as if by some magic here I am, standing in front of it, taking it all in.
Transfixed.
Take one look at the faded photograph of the charming villa above and you might think this a story about Oxford house prices. Far from it. It’s the tale of John Towle, the Victorian mill owner turned architect who created this unconventional dwelling – a house of cards I suppose one might say, for it is constructed almost entirely from paper. Not the ‘huff and puff and blow your house down’ kind of paper production of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. But a residence that stood strong and upright from when it went up in 1844 until it was finally demolished in 1996. That’s an amazing lifespan for any building. Never mind one made of paper.
Kazem Hakimi has run the fish and chip shop at the far end of the Iffley Road for the past 38 years. It’s an old school takeaway. A narrow frontage in a parade of shops that include an estate agent, a cafe and a bike store. Fryers and warming cabinets, standing room only at the front, a small counter on which to wrap and serve, posters and fliers advertising local events pinned neatly on the wall. So far not so unusual. Except that Kazem is also a photographer and while you are waiting for your battered cod to crisp, he might well ask if you’d mind stepping round the back to have your picture taken. There you will find a makeshift studio open to the elements. Plain white wall, natural lighting, no fancy accessories. A few quick snaps. All done in the time it takes to cook a bag of chips
For it is rumoured that within one of its most prized stained glass windows, created by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and dedicated to St Frideswide the patron saint of Oxford, is secreted a modern lavatory. I want to see this for myself.
I had scrawled the word mulberries across the pages of my calendar for the first week of August. It was to remind me that this was the short window of…
This Friday The Goldfish Bowl on Magdalen Road closes the doors into its watery world of fantastic aquatic creatures for the last time. An institution that has thrilled generations of…
I am standing at the top of a ladder in the garden of a house in Beaumont Buildings, a quiet street of pretty, terraced townhouses hidden away just north of Oxford’s central bus station. Built in 1826 – there’s a date stone set into its chequerboarded brick frontage – this was part of the new residential development that included St John Street, Beaumont Street and parts of Gloucester Green to help alleviate the surge in the city’s population in the early years of the 19th century. But I was here to look at something a lot older.