From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
A few years ago, a series of ill omens emerged from my childhood home of Oxford. In 2019, the ancient and beautiful blossoming almond tree outside the University Church was felled when it became unsafe. The same year, the radio presenter, entrepreneur and local personality Bill Heine died. Heine’s most remarkable contribution to the city was the 25-foot fibreglass shark, designed by sculptor John Buckley, that he inserted head-first into the roof of his Headington home; after his death, the shark was protected by the council, an uncomfortable fate for something erected in defiance of petty officialdom. And in 2020, Boswell’s, the city’s venerable department store, closed for the last time.
I wrote about Boswell’s in Apollo’s architecture column in April 2021, as part of a more general elegy for department stores. Though sad, its demise was far from surprising. Even in the 1980s, when I was growing up in the city, it was clear Boswell’s best days were behind it. Indeed, that was one of the reasons it attracted affection: it was an obvious relic. But a business cannot survive on affection alone. Patrick McGuinness puts it well in his book Real Oxford (2021): ‘Everyone loved Boswell’s … [but] I never said everyone shopped there.’
Boswell’s fate, I grumbled in 2021, was to become a luxury hotel. This, it seemed at the time, entailed two possible paths: one, the obliteration of all traces of the old shop; or, two, its disturbing transition to a form of commercial un-death, as the succeeding business robes itself in the relics of the institution it has replaced. The architect Sam Jacob called this latter path ‘macabre ritualism’ in an essay for Icon magazine in 2011, ‘architecture as Greek tragedy where guilt, regret and shame for a terrible act is punished by a never-ending penance of hopeless acts of architectural resuscitation’.
It’s unfair to hang that on the door of the new hotel. After all, it didn’t kill Boswell’s, the pandemic did, and the murder weapon was inevitability. But there was a precedent which gave grounds for concern. Oxford’s miserable Victorian prison adjoins what remains of its ancient castle, part of a complex that also includes charmless modern buildings for the county council. Throughout my childhood, this was a grim and forbidding place, spreading an atmosphere of punishment to its surroundings. The prison closed in 1996, at least 50 years late. To the enduring bemusement of many in the city, it was converted into a branch of the Malmaison hotel chain, and the prison buildings were suddenly filled with glitzy fittings and coloured LED lighting. Although it is impressive that such a silky purse could be made of the most swinish ear, the whole environment is slightly queasy. A search for ‘Malmaison Oxford’ on Instagram will show what I mean: it’s unnerving seeing swanlike influencers draped where the suicide nets once hung, sometimes wearing stripey Laurel and Hardy jailbird pyjamas.
View of a room in The Store hotel, in the former Boswell’s department store on Broad Street in Oxford. Photo: Adam Lynk
There’s much less scope for questionable taste in a former department store, but the fact the new hotel is called ‘The Store’ did suggest a slightly ghostly experience. Actually, The Store is mostly impeccable in its judgement, and in places more respectful to the history of the site than is strictly necessary – for instance, retaining the Boswell & Co signage above the main entrance, which keeps the nearly 300-year-old name alive, but is not of particular interest in itself. Much more pleasing is the restoration of the shop windows along Broad Street, formerly host to some rather desultory mannequins and piles of luggage. Around the entrance, the windows are being used as a gallery space, keeping a little touch of the entrepôt that department stores should have – more so than a collection of casserole dishes, anyway. The rest look on to the hotel bar, which is precisely the sort of twinkly, treat-y destination that good department stores and good city centre hotels should share as an aspiration.
My memories of the store are almost entirely of an interior warren, and windows barely feature. The hotel’s inner circulation – designed, like the rest of the project, by Urban R, a division of the hotel developer Reef Group – unexpectedly (and perhaps unintentionally) keeps some of this labyrinthine interiority. It’s all amply proportioned, but dark wooden panelling makes it enclosed and austerely cosy, which treads a refined path between the savage bling of the Malmaison and the slightly creaky trad charms of the Randolph, for many decades Oxford’s only really high-class hotel, now ping-ponging between owners as competitors devour its ancient monopoly. The Store’s gloomth offsets the brilliant brightness of its rooms, which nevertheless manage to avoid much of the anxious luxury signalling of other boutique hotels. It’s rather like staying in a rich friend’s well-kept apartment. The rooms on the upper level of the hotel have balconies overlooking Broad Street and the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen at the bottom of St Giles.
Those luxurious balconies, looking at the pinnacled roofline of the historic core and the streams of tourists de-bussing on Magdalen Street, make a good spot to reflect on some of the changes that have overcome Oxford since the mid 1990s, when I left home. I visit the city two or three times a year, more than enough to be aware of the significant physical changes to its centre. But it’s the psychic or symbolic changes, such as the omens mentioned above, that strike deepest. Even prosperity can wreak a kind of ruin.
Oxford has always been a wealthy (if very unequal) city – even if it didn’t feel that way when I was a teenager on the Iffley Road – and it has always been a tourist city. But in recent years both of those qualities have pushed to the fore. Cowley Road, my childhood haunt and once a byword for shabbiness, has become bafflingly trendy. Summertown, location of my old school and my father’s office, used to be indistinguishable from suburban shopping streets elsewhere in the country, but now feels like a transplanted patch of Chelsea, with an Oliver Bonas, a Knight Frank, a Gail’s, even a Daunt’s.
My cycle route to school, between these two inner suburbs, partly followed one of the finest architectural enfilades in the world: Magdalen Bridge, the High Street, Radcliffe Square, Broad Street, St Giles. These are heavily protected spaces, but they have changed far more than a visitor might expect. A strange disaster befell Oxford during my childhood: they cleaned it. My early memories of the city are blackened and vermiculated. The soft golden sandstone of the university buildings was not just stained by centuries of smoke – in places it was reverting to sand, and college walls were flaking and stratified and spider-caved. The outer layer of soot was load-bearing: pick it off (young boys and scabs, you know how it is), and a pale, thin trickle of primordial beach fell out. The balustrades of Magdalen Bridge resembled gnawed apple cores. Some of the gargoyles and pinnacles were leprous stumps. It was all properly gothic in more ways than the narrowly architectural.
Then the great cleaning. For years, the rotted margins of Magdalen Bridge were covered in wood enclosures, which advertised the glacially slow fundraising to restore the structure. Then it was all done in a flash. The colleges fell one by one, presumably as they steadily latched on to the golden potential of fundraising from alumni, the secrets of which were crossing the Atlantic. Historic buildings need continual restoration, of course, and it won’t have been the first time some of those stones were replaced, or the last. But since then, the colleges have been much more on top of the job – and the soot is gone forever.
Oxford High Street, pictured in 1972, before the clean-up. Photo: Stuart/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
It’s an error to be nostalgic, most of all for dirt and dilapidation. It’s not the dirt we’re missing, but something else. Since witnessing this glow-up, the timeless quality of Oxford’s historic core has struck a faintly false note. Though it may still exude ‘the past’, it does not match my own past. It is newer than it used to be. This was a valuable early lesson that timeless does not mean unchanging.
Not that the increasing hordes of tourists mind. I thought I might be imagining that the crowds have steadily grown thicker, but friends who have remained in the city agree. The astounding soft power of fantasy literature plays a role here, judging from what’s on sale in the tourist shops, which leans heavily towards Tolkien, Pullman and films about a certain boy wizard. (The assorted Lewises – C.S., Carroll and Morse & – seem to be in eclipse nowadays.) And the city continues to inspire imaginative literature, which in turn draws in new visitors. Babel, a recent fantasy bestseller by R.F. Kuang, centres on a reimagined Radcliffe Square, in which a tower of magical linguistics rises next to James Gibbs’s baroque Radcliffe Camera.
Literary Oxford is now served by a new temple, just north of Radcliffe Square, at the end of Broad Street. The Weston Library, previously the New Bodleian, is another former fortress, this time designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. It’s a sort of rusticated capstone for deep underground storage facilities, and in my youth it had the mood of a bunker. I sometimes worked in the building during vacations from my own university and found it cramped, stuffy and lacking in natural light. This dreary building has been transformed: the front wall is gone, and a vast atrium has been carved out of the innards of the structure by Wilkinson Eyre. It has excellent free exhibitions and is the location of the Bodleian Library’s gift shop, which has a better class of fantasy-tinged souvenir.
The other end of Broad Street, just outside The Store, has also been transformed by partial pedestrianisation. This improvement has been proposed, discussed and delayed as long as I can remember. As is often the case with pedestrianisation, now that it has happened, it is amazing it took so long. Moving further west, out of the ‘gown’ part of the city and into the ‘town’ part, a similar drastic improvement has occurred at Bonn Square, named for the former capital of West Germany, Oxford’s twin city. Bonn Square was another rather shunned place in my childhood as it was a sort of fenced street-drinking creche, and hardly a credit to the town-twinning scheme. Now it has been opened up, pavement-cafe’d and united with the surrounding streets.
The new Westgate shopping centre, which replaces an earlier building. Photo: Nick Caville
Opposite Bonn Square lies the most remarkable transformation of all, of a kind not seen since the 1960s and ’70s. The new Westgate shopping centre is quite startling in its mammoth scale. Its facade on Queen Street is somewhat monumental and mostly banal, with an asymmetric arch topped by a staring lidless aperture. Through the arch, one sees an intriguing glimpse of barrel-vaulted arcade, suggestive perhaps of the 2nd Street Tunnel in Los Angeles, seen in so many movies. Beyond this tunnel one emerges into an enormous chasm of commerce, with the proportions and personality of a well-heeled European airport terminal. It is of course a thoroughly mercenary environment, and hardly of a piece with the rest of the city centre. But in urban terms it is surprisingly successful, bisected by inviting through-paths that connect formerly truncated areas around St Ebbe’s and Paradise Street.
The ancient houses on Paradise Street, which used to feel like almost supernatural survivals, and which were my go-to mental image when reading H.P. Lovecraft’s descriptions of witch-haunted Arkham, have been mercilessly spruced, and are adjoined by a Premier Inn. And we are back at what is now the ‘Castle Quarter’, an unsettling collection of bars, eateries and heritage experiences around HMP Malmaison; the secluded bosky areas around the castle mill stream have been opened up, and no longer feel like the secret they used to be. It belongs to the influencers now.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.