Oxford started as an Anglo-Saxon border outpost, with a bridge
replacing the 'oxen ford' from which it takes its name. It became a
centre 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, theatres,
innumerable restaurants, shopping centres, an ice-rink, business
and technology centres, 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 theatre, 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.
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