Inspiring Oxford
Gloucester Green. What memories that name evoked when I was online a couple of months ago, working out how exactly I would get myself to the city of Oxford after my Aer Lingus flight landed me in Heathrow. And there it was – the name of the end-of-the-line stop on the coach journey from the Central Bus Station at Heathrow to poet Matthew Arnold’s ‘City of Dreaming Spires’.
Gloucester Green is the bus station in Oxford. It’s located to the rear of one of the city’s main thoroughfares – Beaumont Street – where you’ll find the famous Ashmolean Museum, the Oxford Playhouse, and the rather swish Randolph Hotel. And also the house at No.22 where I had my bedsit on the top floor, above the downstairs dental practice, when I was a postgraduate student at the university back in the Seventies, arriving there in October 1978.
And now, here I was, exactly 40 years later, in October 2018, returning for the first time.
It was the wedding of Regina Lavelle, a former colleague in the Irish Daily Mail, that finally drew me back. The shindig was in Oxford, she said, but would I still come? Would I what?!
And so into Gloucester Green I landed a couple of weeks ago, to the very place where, throughout the winter of 1978/79, I snuck out a back gate of my house and on to a freezing bus at the crack of dawn every morning to be driven through the white landscape of a frostbitten Oxford countryside to the town of Bicester, to be challenged for the day by the teenagers of the local comprehensive where I was doing my ‘teaching practice’, and still foolish enough to believe that I was going to have the staying power to teach for a living.
Now, I was back. So off the bus and around the corner I went, strolling up Beaumont Street and pausing to have a good look at No.22. Imagine my surprise to find that it was still a dental practice!
From there I wandered on up the street before turning in through the doors of the Randolph Hotel. Here I was, actually staying in the hotel whose windows I had virtually pressed my nose against all those decades ago, trying to catch a glimpse of how the other half lived. Afternoon tea in The Randolph? Even a drink in the bar? Utterly out of my league back then – even if I had managed to get myself, dressed in my student garb of choice (maxilength pinafore with Moses sandals – oh, God!) past the doorman.
Now here I was ensconced in a lovely room with views to die for. From one window I looked directly down on the city’s Martyrs’ Memorial and across a skyline peppered with those famous spires, while from another I looked straight out at the Ashmolean Museum. My stay was really enjoyable (the snailslow lifts notwithstanding!) and, as I mentioned here last week, the freshly cooked breakfasts were first class.
Arriving on a Friday afternoon and with the wedding scheduled for the following day, I spent a few hours wandering down memory lane. First stop? Brasenose, my old college, located in the lovely square from where you can gain access to the stunning Bodleian Library and where, directly in front of Brasenose, stands the beautiful Radcliffe Camera.
Nothing had changed, of course. Let’s face it, a college that has stood the test of time since the 16th Century is hardly going to have transformed itself in the past four decades.
Apart from a stroll around the city to remind myself of some of the hang-outs from my student days – the Covered Market, the grounds of Magdalen College (really beautiful), the Jericho district, the White Horse pub, a watering hole of mine before John Thaw pitched up there as Inspector Morse a decade later – I was dead set on visiting two specific places.
First up was Blackwell’s bookshop on Broad Street, a wonderful shop, higgledy-piggledy in layout, where you could – and I did – lose yourself for a few hours. It is the best bookshop I have ever come across and I was worried it would have changed for the worse, but no, still brilliant, still with great staff, every possible book you could want and, nowadays, a small cafe area on the first floor. I visited it three times – on the Friday afternoon, early Saturday morning and again, for a last hurrah, on the Sunday morning.
The other place that I was intent on seeing again was the Eagle and Child pub, out along St Giles. Known locally as the Bird and Baby, it was my pub of choice 40 years ago, partly for its great atmosphere and partly because it was a short stroll to my flat in Beaumont Street. I loved its old worldliness and its literary associations – it was a regular meeting place for JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Not much had changed in 1978 since the writers held court there, and I’m happy to say that it still retains all of its original appeal.
I sat here at a table on the Friday evening as darkness started to fall, sipping a glass of Merlot, reading my book, and remembering the happy times I had spent here.
I loved my return visit to Oxford, realising just how much it still has to offer. Yes, there is still a sense that the university dominates the city, but, with some 38 colleges to its name, that is only natural.
On the Sunday morning, before I pitched up at Gloucester Green again to catch the 2pm coach back to Heathrow, I took a last stroll around the city. Back I went to Brasenose and then, after a coffee in the Grand Cafe on the High Street, I walked through to Christ Church Meadow – the lovely grounds (complete with cattle, and yet only around the corner from Marks & Spencer!) of Christ Church College.
Here, in the morning sunshine, and with the trees resplendent in their coat of autumn colours, I walked amid the glory of the college grounds, enjoying it for what it was, right now, in this moment in October 2018. And I found my mind straying back again to when I was still a young girl, lucky to call this beautiful city my home, if only for just a year of my life.