If you’re a fan of American billionaires buying up much-loved British institutions, then you, too, might be rejoicing at news that Larry Ellison has set his sights on purchasing much of Oxford. The squillionaire owner of the software technology company Oracle (net worth: $270 billion, or thereabouts) has started relatively small, however. In addition to spending a huge amount of money on the Ellison Institute of Technology in the city’s Science Park, he has also paid a supposed $10 million for one of its best-known and most-loved alehouses, the Eagle and Child, aka ‘the Bird and Baby’.
The pub is bang in the centre of Oxford on St Giles and has existed in some form or another since the late 17th century, but became most famous in the 20th for playing host to the literary group known as the Inklings. These men included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and would meet in the back room of the pub (also known as the Rabbit Room) to drink ale, smoke their pipes and read each other works-in-progress. It was in the Bird and Baby that The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Lord of the Rings were first discussed. It was also here, famously, that when Tolkien was reading to the assembled company, one of their number, the academic Hugh Dyson, scoffed: ‘Not another fucking elf!’
It is this history that Ellison has promised to preserve, and, admittedly, the initial plans for the pub, which is now intended to reopen in spring 2027, look promising enough. He has hired the leading architectural firm Foster + Partners (who do not come cheap), and the current plans for the Eagle and Child include restoring the front rooms to their original state – as last seen in 1863 – and converting the neighbouring building into a bakery. There are also grandiose ideas of turning the back of the pub into a restaurant, of building academic meeting rooms and study spaces on the upper floors, and, no doubt, resurrecting the spirits of Lewis and Tolkien too, should funding – no doubt, God help us, fuelled by AI – allow.
It’s all very commendable, and certainly the Bird and Baby has been in need of a facelift for a considerable time. It shut its doors at the beginning of the pandemic, and half-formed plans to open a boutique hotel above it failed due to lack of space. Likewise, even when it was operating as a pub, there was something down-at-heel and dissatisfying about it. The food was terrible, the drinks barely better and if you visited the gents, you might come back looking like Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm, and mutter darkly about ‘something nasty in the woodshed’.
Oxford’s eccentric and quintessentially English charms are, apparently, up for grabs to the highest bidder
Yet Ellison’s ability to buy the pub and spend an equally vast amount refurbishing it, although impressive, is the latest in a lengthy series of very wealthy men trying to create a legacy in Oxford. In the past couple of decades alone, we’ve had Wafic Saïd and his horrible-looking business school; Len Blavatnik and his rather more architecturally interesting school of government; Stephen A. Schwarzman, who paid £185 million for a soon-to-open new arts and humanities centre in Jericho that will bear his name; and now Ellison, muscling in on technology and taverns alike. While local residents like me are grateful for much-needed investment in the city, which is conspicuously not coming from the ever-beleaguered council, it is a shame that Oxford’s eccentric and quintessentially English charms are, apparently, up for grabs to the highest bidder.
There is another issue at hand, too. St Giles is also home to the Eagle and Child’s long-term rival, the Lamb and Flag, which sits opposite. When it came to the pandemic, St John’s College, which used to be its owner, divested itself of the pub, claiming (absurdly) that ‘the college, as a charity, is not allowed to financially support a loss-making business that is not part of its core charitable objectives’. Yet rather than see it turned into more college accommodation or meeting spaces, a band of small investors, the so-called Inklings Group, bought the pub and restored it. It is now one of Oxford’s most pleasant and most beloved places to drink and meet, a far cry from the rather uninspiring dive that it had been when owned by St John’s.
Had this spirit of very British entrepreneurship been allowed to extend to the Bird and Baby as well, I have no doubt that Oxford would now have another terrific pub. As it is, while I’ll be among the first to return to the new Eagle and Child, I will be looking around me when I order my first pint among the immaculate woodwork and gleaming brass. Even as I drink my expensive craft beer, I will hope that I can hear the ghost of an Inkling say, faintly: ‘Not another fucking billionaire.’
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