The cliché about Oxford – and as a resident of the city, I have skin in the game here – is that it’s the most beautiful city in Britain. Think of all the writers and poets who have rhapsodised about its glories, from Evelyn Waugh immortalising (some would say fossilising) it in Brideshead Revisited to Matthew Arnold’s famous description of it in his poem ‘Thyrsis’ as ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires/She needs not June for beauty’s heightening’. It has more Grade I listed buildings in its centre than anywhere of a similar size and has innumerable architectural wonders. The incomparable Radcliffe Camera stands at its heart – often described as the most striking public building in England. So why is so much of Oxford being not merely neglected, but positively ruined?
I’m with Bill Bryson on the besmirching of Oxford. In his Notes from a Small Island, Bryson wrote despairingly:
You tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, well-preserved cities in the world? I’m afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.
The result is aesthetic impoverishment for both Oxford’s residents and visitors alike
Well, I don’t just feel shame, Bill – I feel a growing sense of anger. Walk round the historic centre of Oxford today, and jostling with the (admittedly wonderful) colleges and north Oxford mansions are eyesores so unpalatable, so wrong that it is hard to believe that any architect had designed them. Or indeed that any right-thinking institution or individual could ever have commissioned them in the first place.
We’ll begin with the most recent and high-profile offender, the grotesque Cheng Yu Tung building on Cornmarket Street, commissioned by Jesus College. This particular thoroughfare has always suffered from neglect, but now it’s little more than a sad mishmash of unlicensed Harry Potter merchandise shops, indifferent fast-food outlets (get your McDonalds and Pret here!) and now this unsightly behemoth. The author and clergyman Fergus Butler-Gallie described it best when he called it ‘soulless, incoherent and looming: it looks like the Tesco Express in the City of Dis’. It is no surprise that, on its first floor, it hosts the ironically named Cosy Club, a bar-restaurant with faux-Victorian décor that looks like a morphine-induced fever dream. A terrible building, after all, deserves equally unappealing tenants. Depressingly, it has somehow been nominated for a Royal Institute of British Architects award, which it will probably win.
If this was a hideous one-off, we could shrug, sigh and ignore it. But there are, unfortunately, plenty more. When you leave the train station – itself a horrible 1990 construction that offers an anti-climatic welcome to this great city – you are confronted with Dixon Jones’s dismayingly ugly Saïd Business School. The building opened in 2001 and is festooned with what looks like a defeated pyramid at its top: a perverse take on a dreaming spire.
Trudge past the closed-down shops of Hythe Bridge Street or the seedy nightclubs of Park End Street, and before too long, you’ll be at the Westgate Centre, another Dixon Jones design. It is a mega-mall that has little or no sympathy with the architectural heritage of the city. The only reasons why I’d give it a pass are a) because it contains the city’s best-appointed cinema, a Curzon, and b) that the original Westgate was such a Seventies horror that this is something of an improvement. But, still.
We’ll ignore the aesthetic sins of nearby Queen Street, where only Carfax Tower has any merit, and look longingly towards the parts of Oxford that remain unspoilt and glorious: the High Street, Broad Street and Turl Street, to name but three. But there are plenty of other places to provoke us to anger. There’s the unspeakable municipal building that houses the city council’s offices; the grimness of the inaccurately named Gloucester Green, with all its grubby horrors and a bus station to boot; and the many sins against design and good taste that are to be found on George Street, which the police once described, longingly, as ‘a haven of vomit and violence’. Perhaps some distinguished architectural critics had seen it for the first time, and, horrified, had instigated a punch-up. (‘Don’t call me the pretender to Pevsner, you rotter!’)
But what of the university buildings? Surely they are sacrosanct, given the labours of the world’s finest architectural minds? Well, not exactly. There was an unfortunate flirtation with brutalism in the Sixties that resulted in some true catastrophes. This was especially the case, for some reason, in the physics and engineering departments, which house two of the city’s most horrific monsters in the unlovely forms of the Thom and Denys Wilkinson Buildings, looming over the University Parks like gorgons. Then there’s the Denys Lasdun-designed English and Law faculty, which looks like a particularly depressing municipal swimming pool. More contemporary flourishes are by no means successful, either; the late Zaha Hadid’s 2015 design for the university’s Middle East centre, the Investcorp Building, resembles nothing so much as a vast, distended trumpet.
I am fully in favour of innovation when it’s worthwhile. While some revile the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Blavatnik School of Government in Jericho, I love it. It’s witty, striking and distinctive – all the things that contemporary architecture should be. And I have high hopes for the forthcoming, vastly expensive Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, which should finally give Oxford a decent concert hall to replace the gloriously beautiful but notoriously uncomfortable Sheldonian.
The difficulty in Oxford, though, is that its architecture has been subsumed to the worst kind of instincts: penny-pinching councillors on the one hand, who wouldn’t know beauty if it leapt up and bit them, and out-of-touch dons and administrators on the other, easily bamboozled by some flashy impresario’s latest display of emperor’s new clothes-esque ostentation. The result is aesthetic impoverishment for both its residents and visitors alike.
Still, sometimes age confers respectability upon eyesores. When Keble College was first built in 1870, William Butterfield’s red brick design was considered so bold that John Ruskin lambasted it as ‘a dinosaur in a Fair-isle sweater’. He took a different walk through the parks each day so that he could avoid catching sight of it. When Wilde began his studies at the university four years later, he described Oxford as the most beautiful city in the world ‘in spite of Keble’. St John’s College was so affronted by its new neighbour that it began a ‘Destroy Keble College’ society, of which annual membership was conferred by successfully removing a red brick from Butterfield’s building. Life membership could be won by stealing an even rarer blue brick from its edifice.
Yet now, Keble is a Grade I listed building held in great regard and affection by its inhabitants and passers-by alike. Perhaps the same reception awaits some of Oxford’s eyesores. Somehow, though, I doubt that its less successful aesthetic experiments will ever endure.
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