One of the last Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life

This book is about the Cowley Road, which runs for about a mile and a half south east out of Oxford towards a place where they assemble motor cars. Most of it was built up between 1830 and 1940, in many varieties of cheap and sometimes cheerful brickwork for the housing and lodging of ungenteel and downright working-class newcomers needed by but not welcome inside the well-fenced seat of learning across the river Cherwell. The far end crossed a marsh and was colonised and re-routed by Morris car workers between the wars; the dividing line was marked by the grandiose Regal cinema, which dwindled into a bingo hall in the 1970s and is now a huge, padlocked nothing.

The road has a frenetic history still detectable in rebuilt reaches, which may remind Londoners of the many shabby two-storey conduits linking middles to outers all round the capital: the line up of small and transient businesses, the sharp new shopfronts set between dusty declining frontages, shrill political graffiti, posters for musical events slapped up in layers, organic refuse underfoot. Here it is ‘squeezed like toothpaste from a tube’ away from the beautiful city which is stifling with tourism, cack-handed development, corporate greed and heritagitis, and James Attlee thinks his road is a ‘barometer of the health of the nation’ where the cultures of Europe, Asia and the West Indies and North Africa co-operate.

He exaggerates, but this remains one of the last three Oxford thoroughfares with a bit of life in it. For the time being, before the rents shoot up and the developers triumph, it is where you go for foreign fruit, halal meat, exotic dry goods, cheaper domestic wares, direct calls to Dakkar, the Authentic Flavour of Kurdistan and 17 other lands, and all the amenities floating in the wake of the immigration quinquireme.