“Why would anyone from the public ever dream of going to a homeless hostel or homeless training centre? You’d probably be a bit scared by it…Similarly why would a homeless person, who’s in quite a tricky place in life, go and see a show in a theatre or take part in a dance class? What’s unusual about this place is that those two things happen all the time without people even realising they’re happening,” said Jeremy Spafford, Artistic Director at the Old Fire Station.
You might not have realised that the majestic red-brick building on George Street, which advertises itself as a Fire Station and a Corn Exchange, is in fact home to the homelessness charity Crisis and to a public arts centre. Student shows don’t tend to inhabit the place, and even if Crisis ever were at freshers’ fair, you’ve probably spent the rest of your time here trying to blank out all memories of the traumatic day.
But you’re not alone. Spafford confessed that a lot of people are confused about what goes on inside this building, being unsure whether “it’s an arts centre with some strange homeless thing going on” or “it’s a homeless centre with some strange arts thing going on.”
This confluence, however, is what makes the OFS so special; “simply having
those people alongside each other is in itself a really significant thing… You’re saying the lines between those people are not as clear as we’d like to imagine,” as Spafford put it.
The idea is not to lure the public in to see shows out of a sense of charity. The arts centre is determined to stand on its own two legs. And it does so exhaustively. There’s a theatre, an art gallery, a cafe, a shop (which, contrary to standard practice in Oxford, is not a chainstore), a dance studio, studios for professional artists, studios for classes, and a flexible space known as the loft. “There aren’t any other venues [in the city centre] where you cross art forms so easily and where space is so flexible,” according to Spafford.
Their Tuesday nights are particularly unusual. One of the regular shows they host is a theatre scratch night, where local writer-performers bring along work in progress, on which the audience are immediately invited to give comment. The writers find it invaluably useful and “the audience are just really enjoying the fact that you’re allowed to say what you think directly to the artist and they don’t mind.”
“Short Stories Aloud” is another of the Tuesday night shows. The name gives the game away, though they get some not-inconsiderable names to perform; their next one will feature Julie Mayhew from Radio 4. Entry is by ticket, with a complimentary piece of cake, or by bringing along a cake.
The building itself has had a long history. Built as a fire station and a corn exchange in the 1890s, the internal structure has varied considerably. It was redesigned into its current gleaming state a couple of years ago; “when the architects came in, there were twenty seven different staircases of which none went to all of the floors.” The solution was to put a main staircase into the hose tower, known to the OFS’s inhabitants as the “hidden spire”, being “the dreaming spire of Oxford you can’t see from the outside. Back in the 1890s the hoses were leather and if you left them in a heap they would rot… So some poor boy would climb up the metal ladder, which you can still see, and hang the hoses so they could dry out,” Spafford explained.
The architects opened up the building, introducing a lot of natural light, while also leaving as much as possible intact. The result is a building that is intensely modern, but with a sense of its own history. They didn’t quite beat the staircases, though. You still need to use at least two to get to all of the five floors.
