Entertainingly-written and concise guide to Oxford and its environs.
Oxford started as an Anglo-Saxon border outpost, with a bridge replacing
the "oxen ford" from which it takes its name. It became a center for
trade and religion and developed one of the oldest universities in
Europe from the late twelfth century. Since the Middle Ages its
individual colleges have gone on building--chapels, halls,
accommodation, libraries--in an extraordinary variety of styles from
Gothic to Brutalist. Oxford also has many churches, a Covered Market, an
extraordinary museum of Natural History in soaring iron, glass and
stone, and a flamboyant neo-Jacobean Town Hall. In such a place,
suggested W.B. Yeats, "one almost expects the people to sing instead of
speaking." Nevertheless, Oxford has become a busy modern city. For much
of the twentieth century the car industry, established in Cowley by
William Morris (Lord Nuffield), dominated local life. Today there are
cinemas, theaters, innumerable restaurants, shopping centers, an
ice-rink, business and technology centers, close links to London by bus
and train. Amidst the expanding city Oxford University retains its
academic excellence, its student exuberance and its physical beauty. And
it has been joined by a notably successful second university, Oxford
Brookes. Martin Garrett discusses the literature Oxford has generated:
from Chaucer to Lewis Carroll, Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Barbara Pym, Tolkien
and C.S. Lewis and Iris Murdoch. There are also chapters on
architecture, on religion, on theater, film and art--including Oxford's
great museum of art and history the Ashmolean--and on leisure pursuits
(punting and rowing, gardens, student pranks, city fairs and carnival).
A chapter on commerce focuses on Victorian shops, Cornmarket and the
Morris Motor Works, while a brief social history includes the former
Oxford Castle and a gallery of dons as rulers--visionary or ignorant,
charismatic or dull. Garrett looks at social change, especially the
transformation in the position of Oxford women, and considers the city's
darker side of crime. A final chapter explores its rich surroundings:
the countryside where Matthew Arnold's "black-winged swallows haunt the
glittering Thames," the baroque grandeur of Blenheim Palace, the ancient
windswept Ridgeway and White Horse.
