I have to admit that I have a bit of a phobia of sharks, so much so that as a child I didn’t like swimming in the sea. Or fresh water. Or indeed in swimming pools. So the first time I saw the Headington Shark, diving headfirst into an otherwise normal looking house and stretching its tail 25ft into the Oxford skyline, I was a little unnerved. Not just because I’m still afraid to look at sharks, but rather because it’s an invasive symbol: this powerful and dangerous creature, entering the place in which people feel most secure: the home.
I wouldn’t have articulated it like that at the time, but funnily enough this sense of the unsettling was part of the intention behind the Shark sculpture. In The Hunting of the Shark, Bill Heine (who commissioned the Shark and still lives beneath it) recounts how shortly after moving into his new house in Headington in 1986, American airstrikes on Tripoli started. A few days later, the nuclear disaster took place at Chernobyl. It was against the backdrop of such events that the Shark was formed. After talking art, politics (and aquatic creatures) with his friend the sculptor John Buckley, the idea of a shark in the roof came into being. The sculpture was put up on 9th August, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, intended as a symbol of the invasion of the personal space of the home, but also as something eccentric enough to intrigue and amuse.
The Hunting of the Shark comes out 25 years after the Shark first appeared. It tells the story of the Shark, from its inception through to finally becoming an accepted part of the Oxford skyline. It was a journey which took almost six years during which Heine had to navigate the bureaucracy of planning committees, a criminal court trial, a public inquiry, an arrest warrant and ultimately an intervention by the Secretary of State for the Environment. The book also brings together various articles and poems about the Shark, letters and comments from famous figures including Philip Pullman and Mohamed Al Fayed, and images of the Shark in all forms, from construction to floodlit completion, from cartoons to artistic representations.
The Shark is now one of Oxford’s (indeed Britain’s) most iconic landmarks, and for this reason alone the story behind it is interesting. It’s also very funny – the sense of humour required to put a shark in your roof in the first place has certainly not diminished over the last twenty five years and shines through Heine’s writing. And it’s also a book that makes you think – what is art? Is it public or private? Can you illustrate a political point in a humorous way? And is a modern sculpture completely out of place in an old city?
Despite the fact that the book sometimes dedicates a little too much time to describing each planning decision, and that it ultimately lacks the power of suspense, as the continued presence of the 25ft fibreglass Shark in Headington speaks for itself on the success of Heine’s battle, it’s definitely worth a read for anyone who has a little, or a lot of, affection for this dreaming tail amongst all the spires.
The Hunting of the Shark (published by Oxfordfolio) is available from Oxfordfolio, all Oxford bookshops and Amazon, £14.99.
