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King Charles III inaugurates the Schwarzman Centre 

Mair Andrews
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King Charles III inaugurates the Schwarzman Centre 

King Charles III officially opened the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and unveiled a plaque to commemorate his visit. His Majesty was greeted by the University of Oxford’s Chancellor, Lord William Hague, Vice-Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracey, and Stephen Schwarzman, whose donations funded the £185m building. 

During the visit, the King spoke with individuals involved in the building’s construction, academics from the humanities faculties, and community organisations which use the site. He met representatives from the Centre’s Cultural Programme and the Leys Festival, an ongoing collaboration between residents and the Centre to celebrate creativity. A choir of secondary school children from across Oxford performed during the visit.

His visit also included a showcase of historic musical instruments from the University’s Bate Collection, selected by representatives from the Faculty of Music, and a rare Bach manuscript from the Bodleian Library. 

In a short speech, the King said it gave him “great pleasure” to celebrate the opening of the building, which brings together the University’s humanities departments under one roof. 

Stephen Schwarzman, the philanthropist and businessman after whom the building is named, said: “ Throughout decades of public service, His Majesty King Charles III has been a thoughtful and prescient voice on many of the defining questions of our time, all the while championing dialogue across disciplines, cultures, and generations. It is my hope that the Schwarzman Centre will contribute to this dialogue by advancing scholarship that addresses humanity’s most pressing challenges and fostering global collaboration here in the heart of Oxford.”

Lord Hague said: “It was a privilege to welcome His Majesty The King to mark the opening of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, a moment that celebrates both an extraordinary new addition to Oxford and the enduring importance of the humanities. 

“At a time when the world is changing with extraordinary speed, the study of history, languages, philosophy, literature, music and the arts helps us understand who we are, how we have arrived here, and how we might shape the future. This remarkable centre is a powerful statement of confidence in the ability of the humanities to illuminate public life, enrich our culture and equip future generations with the judgement and imagination every society needs.” 

The Royal Visit included receptions at Oriel College, which is celebrating its 700th anniversary, and University College.

The Schwarzman was closed for two days as a security measure agreed with Thames Valley Police and the Proctors’ Office. Faculties informed students of the building’s closure to minimise disruption. In an email sent on 25th June, students in all faculties located in the building were told that the Centre would be closed to all staff, students, and the general public for a “VIP Visitor”.

Performance spaces at the Schwarzman Centre have been open since April 2026 for the Cultural Programme, which “aims to welcome audiences and communities into the heart of the research process at Oxford University through public engagement.” The Centre is also home to the Bodleian Humanities Library, as well as seven humanities faculties and research institutes.

Funded through £185 million in donations from Stephen Schwarzman, the Schwarzman Centre is the largest building project the University has undertaken “since the Renaissance”.

Since its announcement, the Centre has been subject to debate about the role of billionaire benefactors within the University. Schwarzman, an American billionaire, is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Blackstone, an investment firm best known for its private equity business. His connections to Republican politicians, including financial support for President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, provoked the formation of the campaign Oxford Against Schwarzman. At the time of his initial donation, an open letter signed by 27 Oxford academics opposed the University’s decision to accept Schwarzman’s philanthropy. Citing a UN report which singled out Blackstone for its contribution to the global housing crisis, the letter stated that the Schwarzman Centre “will be built with the proceeds of the exploitation and disenfranchisement of vulnerable people across the world”. 

At the Centre’s opening in 2025, a University spokesperson told Cherwell: “Oxford University has robust and rigorous guidelines regarding the acceptance of donations and research funding …  All significant new funders or new gifts or grants from existing funders are reviewed by the Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding (CRDRF) … Those donating money or sponsoring programmes at the University have no influence over how academics carry out their research or what conclusions they reach.”

No One Tells You About the Second-Year Scramble

External Contributor
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Somewhere around the fifth week of Michaelmas, it starts. Not with a formal announcement, not with any kind of pastoral guidance — just a creeping anxiety that spreads through staircase WhatsApp groups and over hall dinners, usually introduced by someone who heard from someone in second year that if you haven’t found a house by Christmas, you’re finished.

This is Oxford’s least-discussed rite of passage: the second-year housing scramble. Everybody goes through it. Nobody really prepares you for it. And in the last few years, it has gotten considerably worse.

The queue

In November 2025, students had queued outside a Finders Keepers letting agency for over 48 hours to secure properties for the following academic year. More than a hundred students. Tents. Winter coats at 5am. Forty properties released at 9am on a Tuesday, gone within hours.

It sounds absurd. It isn’t. The queue has become a fixture, notorious enough that the BBC covered it the previous year, when a first-year Brookes student waited 24 hours for a lease. In 2025, the wait had doubled.

According to one Oxford student, she and her prospective housemates had viewed ten properties through another agency the week before. All ten were snapped up before they could attend the viewings.

This is not a fringe experience. It is what finding a house in Oxford now looks like for the majority of students who leave college accommodation after first year.

What nobody tells you at the open day

The college system creates a comfortable illusion. You arrive in October, your room is ready, your battles are paid termly, the heating (mostly) works. For eight weeks you live in a building that has housed students for centuries, and the logistics of accommodation simply do not require your attention.

Then Michaelmas ends. And someone in your year group sends a message that a good house in Cowley Road just went under offer and maybe you should all have a serious conversation about who you want to live with next year.

The pressure this creates — to lock in friendships that are barely twelve weeks old, to commit to people you haven’t yet fallen out with or become inseparable from — is its own particular stress that sits alongside the academic one. “You feel like you’re making decisions about your entire social life for the next two years based on who you happened to sit next to in a freshers’ week dinner,” says Maya, a second-year reading History. “And then simultaneously you have to decide on a neighbourhood, a budget, whether you want to live with five people or three, all before Christmas collections.”

The market they step into

What Oxford students enter when they leave college is one of the most expensive private rental markets in England. According to the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, the average monthly private rent in Oxford reached £1,956 in April 2026 — the highest of any area outside London. In the same period, the weighted average college rent for undergraduates was around £950 per month.

That jump of more than 100% is not a London premium that students have been warned about and can plan around. It is a local market that has quietly become London-adjacent in price while remaining entirely un-London in terms of wages and support structures.

The agencies know this dynamic well. Finders Keepers, the letting agent at the centre of last year’s queue, operates a policy in which viewings are not conducted before leases are signed — at which point students must put down a holding deposit of a week’s rent. One medical student described it as: “effectively a viewing costs £700.” She added: “Just because we need houses as studentsand letting agencies know that, doesn’t mean they should be able to treat us like this.”

The friendship geometry problem

Underneath the financial pressure is something stranger and harder to articulate: the way the scramble reshapes social dynamics in a place where social dynamics are already unusually high-stakes.

Oxford friendships in first year exist in a bubble — the college bubble, specifically. Everyone is fifteen seconds away from everyone else. You eat together, you socialise in the same JCR, you walk past each other’s doors. The question of who you want to live with next year is therefore being answered before you’ve had the chance to experience what spending real, sustained time with these people actually looks like.

“I ended up in a house with people I chose in week six of first year,” says Tom, a third-year classicist. “By the end of second year I was barely speaking to two of them. But you’ve signed a twelve-month lease. So.” He trails off in a way that suggests the rest of that sentence is too long to complete over coffee.

The problem is structural. The scramble happens at exactly the moment when bonds are newest and the pressure to form them is highest. It accelerates decisions that, in any other context, people would take much longer to make. And unlike most decisions made at eighteen, it has a legally binding contract attached.

The medical student exception

A specific subset of Oxford students has it worse: medics in third year, transitioning to clinical placements at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington. College accommodation, for those who have it, is typically in central or north Oxford — geographically useless for early morning hospital starts. So clinical-year students enter the private market not by choice but by necessity, often at the precise moment their academic workload is at its highest.

“This is routinely the year that people find the most challenging, just because of how big of an adjustment it is to be in the hospital,” said one third-year medical student last year, standing in the queue outside Finders Keepers in November. “So, having this looming over my head plus this whole organisational crisis with trying to find a house is not great, and I know that there’s a lot of people in the same boat as well.”

It is hard to think of a worse moment to be spending your evenings on Rightmove.

The quiet divergence

What the scramble reveals, more than anything, is how differently Oxford students experience the same institution depending on a variable almost entirely outside their control: how much accommodation their college offers, and for how many years.

Some colleges guarantee rooms for all three years of an undergraduate degree. Others offer two. Some allocate on ballot; others on financial need. A student at one college may never touch the private market. Their friend at another college down the road may have been in it since second year, navigating twelve-month leases and absent landlords and the particular misery of discovering in October that your new house in East Oxford has no working boiler.

None of this is made legible to students before they choose a college — a choice that, for most undergraduates, happens at seventeen, on the basis of subject suitability and open day impressions. The financial consequences of that choice, compounded over three years in one of England’s most expensive rental markets, can be enormous.

The college system is Oxford’s great strength and, in this specific respect, its great inconsistency. The quality of someone’s housing experience should not be a lottery whose outcome is determined before they have even sat their A-levels. But right now, more often than not, it is.

How an Oxford undergraduate made a name in choral music

Anish Vedantham
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How an Oxford undergraduate made a name in choral music

For most undergraduate composers, a debut album remains a distant ambition. For Christopher Churcher, a music student and finalist at Lady Margaret Hall, it has already become a reality. His album Moonrise, a collection of choral works recorded with Somerville College Choir, has earned national attention, including being selected as BBC Radio 3’s Album of the Week.

The path to Moonrise began long before Oxford. Christopher started composing at the age of ten or eleven, shortly after beginning piano lessons. But rather than sitting down to compose, Christopher’s primary catalyst for writing music was a reluctance to practise scales. Instead of working through assigned exercises, he found himself improvising melodies and chord progressions at the piano. Eventually he began writing those ideas down.

Music entered his life through several different routes. Growing up in Birmingham, he joined Birmingham Cathedral Choir as a child chorister, learning to sight-read and performing music several times a week. Later, after his voice broke, he moved away from singing and towards orchestral performance, taking up the bassoon and playing with youth orchestras. When he arrived at Oxford, he expected his future to lie primarily in orchestral music. Instead, it was choral music that transformed his direction.

That redirection, sparked inside Somerville’s chapel, is the thread that runs in a more or less straight line to Moonrise. The turning point came towards the end of his first year. Christopher attended one of the college’s contemplations, reflective services that combine music, poetry, and readings. Listening to the Somerville College Choir perform, he experienced what he describes as an epiphany.

“I just had this sort of epiphany that I’d been missing choral music from my life for so long,” he recalls. “I realised that that was where I needed to be.” Although he had spent years pursuing orchestral performance, the artistic language that ultimately felt most natural was the one he thought he had left behind. Through Somerville College Choir and its director, Will Dawes, he rediscovered a musical tradition that had shaped him as a child.

That relationship would eventually become the foundation for Moonrise. The choir provided a collaborative environment in which Christopher’s compositional voice could develop, serving as his “most kind of significant collaborators to date” who have “have hugely inspired the way that [he] write[s]”. Looking back, he is clear that the album would never have existed without Oxford. “This album only happened because I was in the right place at the right time with the right choir and the right director”, he says.

Yet Oxford’s influence extends beyond performance opportunities. Christopher speaks of the university as a creative ecosystem whose value lies in its intellectual diversity. Although he studies music, much of the poetry featured on Moonrise came through conversations with friends studying English and modern languages. The degree itself, meanwhile, exposed him to ideas that challenged his assumptions about what composition could be.

While rooted in the choral tradition, Christopher’s music draws inspiration from far beyond the classical canon. He speaks enthusiastically about artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to contemporary popular musicians. Rather than treating classical music as a sealed cultural category, he approaches it as part of a wider musical landscape. Oxford, he says, “removed any sort of prejudices that [he] had internalised from studying GCSE music”.

But, of course, Oxford isn’t all positive for composition. Christopher is careful not to romanticise the experience. “Oxford really gets in the way of composing,” he says bluntly at one point. The Music degree (like any Oxford degree), he explains, leaves little uninterrupted time for sustained creative work. Unlike a conservatoire education, his course does not centre composition itself. Despite this, he views Oxford as a productive tension, rather than a mere obstacle. The demands of the degree may limit the time available for composition, but they also expose him to ideas, texts, and people that continually enrich his creative work. “Whilst sometimes I can feel like I’m fighting against the degree a bit to find time to write and compose”, he reflects, “it’s so great because the degree is so stimulating”. Oxford, in his view, has been a place where academic study and artistic practice constantly inform one another.

The result is a compositional style that balances sophistication with immediacy. His creative process is surprisingly architectural. Before writing notes, he sketches large visual timelines on sheets of A3 paper, mapping emotional trajectories, climaxes, textures, and harmonic developments. He compares the process to designing a building.

Describing his composition process, he says: “I’ll sit there and think, okay, I’ve got five minutes. Where do I want the high point of the piece to be? How can I create a sense of catharsis for the listener?” The language is telling. Even when discussing structure, Christopher returns repeatedly to emotional experience. Composition becomes a carefully planned emotional journey, which leads him to reject the idea that composition is inherently intellectual. Instead, his music is fundamentally personal and autobiographical. “I think actually that does make me quite different to some classical composers”, he says. While some composers prefer distance between their work and their personal lives, he actively embraces vulnerability. His music functions almost as a form of emotional testimony.Nowhere is that clearer than in the third Pride Motet. Christopher says, “I put my heartbreak and my love and my humanity into that piece”.  

For Christopher, the goal when composing music is to create music that anyone, regardless of their background in classical music, can listen to and appreciate. Asked how he would describe Moonrise to someone without a classical background, he avoids technical language entirely. Instead, he speaks about emotion. The album, he says, is an attempt “to express human emotion” and to create atmospheres that listeners can inhabit regardless of their musical experience. The words he chooses to describe the music – “warm, comforting, atmospheric, emotional, sensitive” – reveal a composer less concerned with intellectual display than with human connection.

As he prepares for the next stage of his career, including a move to Germany and new commissions for choir and orchestra, that commitment remains unchanged. The success of Moonrise has given him confidence that audiences are responding to the values that matter most to him: emotional truth, accessibility, and connection.

Moonrise emerged from precisely that conviction. Beneath its carefully crafted choral textures and ambitious artistic vision lies a simple idea: that music is at its most powerful when it communicates something real. It is an idea Christopher has cemented in his professional repertoire because of Oxford – because of a choir he wasn’t looking for, a director who became a collaborator, and a degree that left him fighting for time even as it gave him plenty to write about. That belief, and that drive to make music accessible, seems likely to remain at the centre of whatever comes next.

‘Scenes With Girls’ and complicated female friendships

Charlie Bailey
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‘Scenes With Girls’ and complicated female friendships

Scenes with Girls deserves to be seen as one of Labyrinth Productions’ (Rosie Morgan-Males and Emily Cullinan) most impressive accolades. It displayed the tension inside a female friendship to such a believable extent that at points the audience were silenced entirely. It felt particularly relevant given this year’s right-wing coverage of an emerging “angry woman” who refuses to conform to established beauty ideals, creating the concern amongst men that she may, horror-of-horrors, renounce them entirely. 

The play centres the friendship of flatmates Tosh (Juliet Taub) and Lou (Sanaa Pasha), and their ex-flatmate Fran (Georgina Cooper), and forces the audience to consider what it means to live as a feminist in today’s day and age. Each character symbolises a varying degree of conformity to the standard “narrative” – the conventional life path ascribed to women which lacks space for female platonic intimacy, and foregrounds the pursuit of heteronormative romantic relationships. Lou persistently seeks sex with men, but wishes she could leave her body as it happens, Tosh chooses not to associate with men at all, and Fran becomes the object of their ridicule as she, in their eyes, allows herself to be dominated by her boyfriend. 

The play questions whether following the narratives we’re fed makes us flawed. Underlying the flatmates’ attempts to define a new feminist consciousness is a sense of sexual competitiveness written into their psyches since “girls’ school”, and ironically it is Tosh who chooses the “desire to be desired” over forging an alternative lifestyle with Lou, briefly doing a “really good impression of a girlfriend” before the two reunite. This production was remarkable for its ability to use laughter to make the audience think. Lines which were instantly funny, such as Taub begging her boyfriend to repeat himself and him saying “you’re so fit”, prompted reflection on the reality of women allowing men’s assessment of their physical appearance to dictate their happiness. Hearing conversations after the performance’s end made me certain that this production will have an enduring impact on viewers’ understanding of heterosexual romance. 

The actors’ versatility prevented the physically intense emotional scenes from losing pace, and Rosie Morgan-Males’ stellar directing allowed the audience to observe when each friend was craving the other’s approval. In such an intimate relationship, tension was physical. Blocking made evident to everyone but Lou that Tosh wanted her undivided attention. Lou’s incessant mentions of sex made Tosh’s shoulders visibly slump, and her dissatisfied expression at times where Lou seemed more focused on her phone gave context to later anger. Later, having been persuaded that she ought to renounce men entirely, Lou is placed behind Tosh so that the audience can notice her hopeful looks as she asserts to Fran that she no longer wants to talk about boys: in a weak imitation of Tosh’s all out separatism, Lou murmurs that she now finds them “gross”. 

Cooper as Fran was a comedic highlight, and Morgan-Males’ choice to push her over-enthusiastic reactions to extremity was well enacted. Cooper’s focus was commendable: the audience could see that while constantly smiling, Fran was also constantly listening, never looking away from the relationship between the two women. This made her later assertion that she “is not stupid” and sees herself worthy of pursuing their feminist lifestyle believable. 

Pasha too is a fantastic emotional actor and it was in her character’s moments of defeat that she shone most. After Tosh confronts her and explains that she is obsessed by “the shit version of love they [men] give you”, her physicality destabilises and for much of the rest of the play she appears untethered, at one stage collapsing on the floor. The sense that she is struggling to avoid a total breakdown was impressively acted, her eyes glazing with tears as she tells Fran that she feels “mad”. 

Taub was impossible not to watch, especially in moments of climactic anger. Her ability to move between a cynical “dead-inside” attitude and brutal anger was phenomenal. In particular, her dogged confrontation of Pasha had the audience visibly uncomfortable. 

The embodiment of the joy as well as pain within Tosh and Lou’s platonic relationship was a highlight. No holds-barred descriptions of Tosh’s sex life, in which the men were always viscerally denounced – “the conversational equivalent of a nosebleed in a swimming pool” – were interspersed with tableaus that convincingly represented the pair as two friends placed firmly in our generation. Non-sensical jokes were thrown at each other while sat apart engrossed in their phone screens. In the parts of the script where their friendship was strongest they sprawled their limbs across each other. It was these unspoken moments that made their friendship seem most real: jokingly poking each other’s legs, or wrestling each other to the ground. 

The actors’ boldness and commitment to every movement gave the play its glowing quality. Their hugs – most memorably after Tosh demands that Lou “dig into this” – successfully transferred an appearance of platonic passion. Alongside whole-hearted physical intimacy, the toilet at the back of the stage was an effective way to demonstrate the lack of boundaries between the characters. The lack of bodily privacy between the two was reflected in its openness to the audience, with some of the most compelling dialogue delivered by Tosh from the toilet seat. In an extremely powerful exchange taking advantage of this set-up, a visibly defeated Taub asked “am I mentally ill?”. 

The “messiness” of the physical intimacy was well complimented by the set, with clothes strewn across the floor. It felt like an illusion to Tracey Emin’s My Bed in an era where women’s lack of total cleanliness is no longer seen as shocking. The simplicity of the costumes (relaxed tops and tracksuits, designed by Clara Woodhead and Mimi Finney) were another indicator of the friend’s closeness. 

The script, like female friendships themselves, is complicated, but the actors tackled it with professional quality. It is rare that a student production is capable of making an audience both laugh out loud, and fall completely silent. To use a cliche, it was jaw-dropping.

Jacinda Ardern and eight others awarded with honorary degrees

Emma Heagney
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Jacinda Ardern and eight others awarded with honorary degrees

William Hague, Chancellor of Oxford, conferred nine honorary degrees in today’s Encaenia ceremony. The recipients include former New Zealand Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern; actress and theatre director Adjoa Andoh MBE; and literary critic and host of Finding Your Roots Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The other honorands are tennis player Billie Jean King; electronics engineer and inventor of blue LED Shuji Nakamura; Nobel Prize-winning economics professor Daron Acemoglu; Birmingham Royal Ballet director Carlos Acosta CBE; biochemist Katalin Karikó, whose mRNA research contributed to the COVID-19 vaccines; and former CEO of GSK Dame Emma Walmsley.

The procession of recipients and senior members of the University walked from Exeter College to the Sheldonian Theatre, where the ceremony took place, around 11.20am. Earlier this year, the Chancellor conferred eight honorary degrees in a Special Honorary Degree Ceremony intended to commemorate the beginning of his Chancellorship.

Image credits: Zoë McGuire for Cherwell.

Encaenia takes place on the Wednesday of ninth week of each Trinity term, and sees the conferral of honorary degrees on recipients selected by the Congregation, a body of over 5,000 staff and academics. The University website describes these awards as “the most prestigious awards the University can confer”. The ceremony is traditionally followed by a lunch, hosted by All Souls College for over 100 years, and a garden party. It has been a constant feature in the Oxford calendar since the 1470s.

Dame Jacinda Ardern GNZM is one of the most prominent honorands this year. As the Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she was praised by international media for her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, Ardern joined the Blavatnik School of Government as a member of the World Leaders Circle, alongside former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Adjoa Andoh MBE is another recognisable face among the recipients. An actress from Bristol, she has performed with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In recent years, she has played Lady Danbury in both Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, the latter of which included a wedding scene filmed in Merton College Chapel.

Dame Emma Walmsley DBE is the only recipient to also be an alumna of the University. She studied for an MA in Classics and Modern Languages at Christ Church, later working at L’Oréal. From 2016 to 2025, she was the CEO of GSK, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and is the first woman to lead an international pharmaceutical company.

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the several Americans awarded today. An academic at Harvard University, he rediscovered the manuscripts of the earliest known African-American novels and is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Professor Gates has also built a successful television career as the host of Finding Your Roots, in which celebrities are presented with their ancestral histories.

Past notable honorands include Nelson Mandela (1996), Dame Judi Dench (2000), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (2001).

Why are so many Oxford graduates leaving the spires for the north?

External Contributor
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Ask any final-year student leaving an exam hall in June where they’re headed next, and London was the obvious answer. Not anymore. More and more Oxford graduates are heading north, and one destination keeps appearing in conversation: Manchester.

The Lure of Manchester

In the capital, rent may eat through a graduate wage before the month is half over, and that is reason enough for plenty of finalists to look elsewhere. Some confess to perusing houses for sale Manchester between revision sessions, imagining a version of adult life where buying a property doesn’t feel like something to fret about a decade from now. There is something softly comforting about that.

Money explains some of the shift, but not all of it. Manchester has spent the last few years creating a reputation that has precious little to do with being “the cheaper option”. Whole areas that were warehouses and factories a generation ago are now filled with studios, independent cafés and small enterprises managed by people who wanted to be there.

And that difference matters. “Many Oxford graduates face a choice between two conflicting instincts: the safer, more prestigious path, or one that lets them build something at their own pace. More and more, Manchester seems to provide a chance to have both: ambition without the relentless financial squeeze.

That same logic extends right into the working world. And that’s where the real appeal begins to emerge.

More than Merely Low-Priced

In recent years, several large businesses in finance, media, and technology have been expanding their northern headquarters, drawn by lower operational costs and a steady supply of graduates from Manchester, Salford, and nearby universities. And for someone coming out of Oxford, it means actual chances, not a safety net.

Ask a graduate eight months into the move, however, and the conversation rarely remains on salary for long. It tends to stray towards the gig they went to last Friday, the five-a-side team they joined within weeks of arriving, and the speed at which the city stopped seeming strange. Manchester has a knack of making people feel at home quickly; its music scene, its football culture, and its directness with strangers all seem to help with that.

What’s striking is how rarely the move seems like settling. Most graduates say it’s quite the opposite: evidence that a strong career and a manageable, pleasurable life don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

That is not to say Oxford has lost its allure or that London is not a sensible option. What has changed is that graduates now have a real choice where career and quality of life are not at opposite ends of a trade-off. That’s just the kind of start that an increasing number of finalists are looking for, and Manchester is where more often than not they are choosing to get it.

‘The Moro Affair’: Astonishingly original, but not quite a story

Ian Coates
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‘The Moro Affair’: Astonishingly original, but not quite a story

I must admit I don’t have much love for musical theatre – not in a holier-than-thee (not thou) sort of way, as I assure you I have significantly less love for opera – but simply on the basis that I am a great lover of stories, and I find that songs are usually an obstacle to the momentum of an unfolding plot. So, when reading this review, bear in mind that as a story-loving, musical-hating, easily-bored theatre-goer, I am quite possibly the worst person in the world to review this play.

The Moro Affair is an original musical, whose script and songs were, to my great admiration, written entirely by Magdalen College’s Alex Rawnsley. When asked for a summary of the play’s plot, Rawnsley told me: “This play is based on a real event which happened in 1978 where the former Italian Prime Minister, who was the most powerful politician in Italy at the time, gets abducted in broad daylight, and the government just… does nothing. And so it’s a story about how all the different facets of Italian society reacted to that, how it progressed, and whether or not they were successful in rescuing him, basically. That is to give the quickest possible summary of what is quite a complicated plot.”

Rawnsley wrote the script and all the music for it, which I find very impressive. The play was clearly crafted with love, and it showed in how professional it felt. The acting was superb across the board, with Harriet Wilson’s Pope as a standout, and Rosie Sutton’s direction was flawless. Frankly, everything about the production was great, contributing to the aforementioned feeling of professionalism (excepting some dismal lighting in one scene). The songs were funny and well-written, and again very impressive given Alex is a mere student (and a medicine student at that), but admittedly not very catchy – though I may just be a simpleton for wanting them to be. I was impressed, through and through.

But to criticise the play a bit, as is my job, I’ll admit I found it a little boring. It didn’t feel much like a story, on account of the fact the characters kept changing: it was the same 6 actors throughout, but they rotated through an endless rota of NPCs to tell vignette-style anecdotes. And whilst they often returned to their ‘main’ characters, I found it difficult to tell, as nothing about their outfits or composure changed, and they were in any case more like dancing exposition machines than 3-dimensional people. Frankly, the play sometimes felt like a singing history textbook. There was a scene where Moro’s wife and daughter have an argument, which was written very well (and performed superbly by Sophia Lee and Emma Hamilton), but I struggled to feel engaged, as I had never seen these characters interact before in my life.

But whilst I may seem harsh in this criticism, I only do so because of how impressed I was by what I saw overall, and how optimistic I am that Rawnsley and this same team could, with a little extra polish, create something truly special – maybe even a musical classic which gay dramakids will be singing about for years to come. Like Wicked, but good. But then again, what do I know? I don’t like musicals.

The Oxford Union was never about free speech

Olivia-Mae Butterfield
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The Oxford Union was never about free speech

A private members’ club audacious enough to promote itself as the “last bastion of free speech”, the Oxford Union is the embodiment of Oxford exclusivity and elitism. Founded by a group of young white men in 1823, the Union’s self-professed object is to encourage rigorous debate, often about some of the most controversial topics of the moment. It occupies a bizarre space between the University and the public, affiliated to neither and mediating between both.

Though times have changed since the founding of the Union, its atmosphere and attitude remain outdated. Yes, there have been recent statements of the Union’s commitment to inclusion – such as its 2022 Policy on Equality, Diversity, Accessibility and Inclusion, which outlines the Union’s aim “to be an open, diverse, accessible and inclusive society in which all who meet the criteria for membership feel welcome irrespective of their legally protected characteristics or socio-economic background”. But words on a page can only do so much to eradicate a culture which has been compounding itself for 200 years, what with its extensive list of alumni Prime Ministers, mostly men, mostly white. Whatever provisions may be in place, the fact of the matter is the reputation and culture that are recognised as part and parcel of the Union. The stereotypes do the work of keeping underprivileged and underrepresented students well away, and discounted lifetime membership is by no means a panacea to this issue.

The image persists of the card-carrying Union member as a rich, self-righteous white man, waving the flag of free speech with a hand adorned in signet rings. But, in fairness, as part of their accessibility plan, the Oxford Union Society’s discounted membership for those from underprivileged economic backgrounds does max out at £137 off the full-priced lifetime membership, which currently stands at a hefty £343. As an independent society that receives no University funding, it is understandable that membership fees play a necessary role in sustaining its buildings, events, and speaker programme. However, despite these initiatives, the price of membership at all begs the question: how far can anyone be said to represent the virtue of free speech if this “free” speech is locked behind a paywall? Especially given the funds the Union is consistently able to raise through private room hire, social events, and termly balls. The numbers don’t matter, it’s the principle. This pompous attitude of self-aggrandisement is what many of us see behind the slogans, hacks, and prestige.

Even the concept of lifetime membership alone is enough to deter some from feeling that they have a place at the Union. Who is a lifetime membership really for? Lowly undergraduates who will return to the site of the Union for the sheer love of debate? Or is it for those students who go on to be the Boris Johnsons, Tony Blairs, or even the W. H. Audens of the future? Policymakers, famous faces, the rich. People who the Union can thrust forward as part of their longstanding historical tradition of prestige. Or, perhaps it is for those residential members, a token gesture to people who actually live in Oxfordshire but aren’t Oxford University students. But don’t be fooled, this isn’t a heart-warming gesture of solidarity with the general public. In the Union’s words, “Any person resident in or near Oxford whose admission would, in the opinion of the Standing Committee, benefit the Society, shall be eligible for election as a Residential Member”. However, to put it more bluntly, these memberships have to be approved, candidates have to be interviewed, and the number of residential memberships is capped annually at 100.

I found all the information here whilst reading through the Union’s 228 page rule document. Some of my favourite rules include Rule 5 (b), which orders that “Membership Cards shall remain the property of the Society”, and “All Members shall carry the Society’s Membership Card or other approved proof of their membership on their person whilst in the Society’s Buildings”. Another is Standing Order E3 (e), which reads “No poster or notice which is not an official Union publication shall be affixed to any wall, window, door, or similar structure in the Society’s Buildings, except with express permission of the President”. Ah, free speech. 

Whilst lingering on this topic of free speech, it might be worth considering who this free speech was originally for. The Oxford Union was founded in 1823, nine years before the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the British franchise to middle-class, propertied men. 1935 marked the year in which women obtained “Third Class membership” to the Oxford Union, allowing them the generous privilege of coming to the Union for tea if they so desired. It wouldn’t be until 1963 that there was a woman who was a full member of the Oxford Union, namely Judith Okely, who went on to become an anthropologist. However, there were notable examples of Union women who served careers in public office, such as former Union president Benazir Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s first female Prime Minister, and the Union’s first female Asian president. Recent presidents and officers have come from a broad range of backgrounds, including the current Oxford Union president, Arwa Elrayess, who has made history herself by being the first Palestinian, first Algerian, and first Arab woman to be president. While these are excellent, positive strides forward for the institution, they beg the question: why are such things still news in 2026? The Oxford Union itself was quite literally not built for most of us. And it seems to me that it is not for most of us still.

Whoever has been most unfortunate enough to encounter Union hacks barricading St Michael’s Street before elections will have surely noted both the demographic, and attitude, of the members representing the Union to University students. A friend of mine was passing down this street when one such member accosted her, questioning what she was even doing on St Michael’s if she wasn’t going to the Union. Still furthering this atmosphere of exclusivity and elitism is the sort of gated community the Oxford Union buildings themselves impress – with parties continuing well into the morning, blaring music, members making a raucous that can only be heard and not seen behind the tall barred gates. And so this idea persists, then, of the Oxford Union as loud, unabashed, and self-important, supposedly contained within its own four walls yet leaking out into Oxford society at large. 

In quite stark contrast to this is the Oxford Students’ Union, an institution which is frequently misconceived as one and the same as The Oxford Union Society. One might be forgiven for this mistake, granted the national media coverage of the Oxford Union, or even the inclusion of ‘Union’ in its title. While the Oxford Union’s purpose is to provide a forum for debate and discussion rather than to act as a representative body for students, even official bodies like Wadham Student Union are quick to iron out the popular misconception between the two institutions in the first sentence of their ‘short guide’ to the University-wide SU. Likewise, at the top of the Oxford University Student Union Wikipedia page, in italics it reads “Not to be confused with Oxford Union”, with a link to the debating society’s own page.  This begs the question: are we, as Oxford University students, united by the Oxford Union? It seems quite obvious that one of these Unions is not quite as interested in the University’s students as the other. 

This contrast can be summed up quite neatly by comparing the opening sentences of each institution’s ‘About Us’ section of their website. The Students’ Union proposes a clear aim of working for and in the interests of Oxford University students: “We exist to represent students’ academic interests, not just for better outcomes, but for a better, more equitable University experience”. The Oxford Union, on the other hand, introduces itself as “the world’s most prestigious debating society with a tradition of hosting internationally prominent individuals across politics, academia, and popular culture”. Perhaps it would be more fitting for the Oxford Union Society to drop the ‘Union’ from its title. I think ‘The Oxford Society’ gives an accurate enough depiction – although only if we are understanding ‘society’ in the Edwardian sense.

A pompous culture rooted in a history of exclusivity, whiteness, maleness, and richness keeps many at arm’s length from the Oxford Union. Locked behind a membership, distinct from both the University and from the public, it begs the question: who is the Union for? The answer, for now, can only be: for itself. 

‘Music can be everything’: Aurora Orchestra’s Jane Mitchell on the narratives around classical music

Lilia Goldstein
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‘Music can be everything’: Aurora Orchestra’s Jane Mitchell on the narratives around classical music

The Aurora Orchestra, who are playing at Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre on the 19th June, are best known for performing their orchestral repertoire from memory. For anyone who’s familiar with classical concerts, this is a huge departure from the norm – orchestral players usually sit demurely in their seats, eyes flitting between their scores and the conductor. It is especially remarkable considering the difficulty of their repertoire, which consists of pieces such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. But, as Jane Mitchell, their principal flautist and artistic director, tells me, performing by heart actually affords a kind of security: “ninety people with that much knowledge in their heads is actually safer than ninety pieces of paper that might fall off the music stand.” 

Learning the pieces by heart allows for a more instinctual, bodily knowledge of the music, “an intensity and an energy and this kind of ownership that the players feel… we know where the piece is coming from and where it’s going.” As an audience member once remarked, it is as if “there are no bar lines.” Their immersive performance style, where players can move around the stage, allows for relationships between players to be forged that might not have formed in a traditional orchestra setting: “one of the only jobs where you literally sit in the same chair for twenty years next to one person.” 

Another way that Aurora departs from the norms of orchestral performance is in their collaborations with actors, using the medium of ‘Orchestral Theatre’ to tell stories about composers. Jane writes the scripts for these performances. She is conscious of the fact that Aurora are, in a way, “paying homage to the canon, and it’s all of those men who’ve been made statues of”. Music history is often constructed as a narrative following the lives and works of a series of ‘great men’. Nevertheless, Aurora has “a real desire to tell their stories in a new way which brings in other voices”, not being afraid to “look at sides of [the composers] that are a bit ridiculous.” Jane suggests that their presentation in fact brings the audience “closer to the composer” by emphasising the more human elements of them, like the grumpy and irrational side of Beethoven.

These ways in which the Aurora Orchestra tries to present classical music differently are part of their more general ethos: that classical music is for everyone. As Jane describes, the orchestra has come up against many practical barriers in doing this: most obviously, it can be really hard to draw in audiences when many people see classical music as being cordoned off for a cultural elite. Jane has also made huge efforts to introduce classical music into educational settings, which can also be made difficult by material barriers at every level – Jane tells me how even when Aurora has offered free tickets to a school, many can’t pay for the bus to get to the concert.

So why is it so important for music to have a role in education? As Jane says, music “can be everything” – it “can be about words, and writing, and counting,” and on a more fundamental level, it is about “understanding what being human is”. This is becoming increasingly more important amid “well-founded fears about effects of screen time” on young children. As such, Aurora play interactive concerts that are specifically aimed at introducing children to classical music, such as Mahler and the Mountain Adventure, and Beethoven and the Dinosaurs. Jane has also developed a free programme called Aurora Classroom, aiming to break down further barriers by adapting the ideas explored in their concerts to a classroom setting. 

The Aurora Orchestra have made waves within classical music by presenting a familiar repertoire in a completely new way – more human, more mobile, more dramatic. They will be performing Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony by heart at 7pm on Friday the 19th June at the Sohmen Concert Hall at the Schwarzman Centre for Humanities. Last tickets can be found on the Schwarzman Centre website, with discounts for students. The orchestra will also be doing a free pop-up performance in the Atrium of the Schwarzman at 4:45 pm on the same day, which is worth coming along to if you don’t fancy paying for a ticket (and useful to be aware of if you’re going to be there revising). 

Branding the beautiful game: How the World Cup logo signifies the commercialisation of football

John Whittingdale
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Branding the beautiful game: How the World Cup logo signifies the commercialisation of football

As billions around the world gear up for the beautiful game to touch down in not one, but three cultural superpowers, there has been an overriding sense of disgruntlement with North America’s vision of the world’s festival. Restlessness with the tournament, hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, has grown steadily since the unveiling of its logo nearly three years ago; far from an empty icon, its design reveals an insight into the growing commercialisation tearing fans away from the game they love. 

Beset by organisational and political problems, the upcoming FIFA World Cup is not only the most ambitious in the institution’s history but also the most marketed. In fact, this World Cup goes where none other has before in the realm of marketing. From Clarkson’s Farm to Coca-Cola, Lego to Lays, there is seemingly no product to which the World Cup treatment has not been extended. Key to this effort is the marketing power invested in the World Cup logo. 

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the World Cup logo for setting the tone of the quadrennial tournament. From the very first World Cup logo at the 1954 Swiss tournament, a stylised ball-like icon incorporating a red Swiss flag turned football pitch in its centre, the World Cup logo has been utilised as a chance to paint a picture of national pride and culture. Through the years, each host has taken up this chance with fresh ideas and new perspectives.

There have been both remarkable successes and notable failures in the history of World Cup logo designs. Mexico’s 1970 World Cup saw what many regard as one of the finest sports logos ever created, its distinctive MEXICO 70 wordmark drawing inspiration from Lance Wyman’s typography for the 1968 Olympic Games. By contrast, England’s 1966 logo lacked both the inspiration and commendation expected for a tournament which brought such iconic moments. Yet, despite their varying levels of success, each of these attempts shared a common goal: they are designed not only to articulate a host nation’s identity but also to communicate its place within an international community brought together by football.

This is what the World Cup is about: drawing football into a global conversation of hope and joy. The World Cup logo is a visual cue for this, stating the organiser’s ambitions for the tournament. The logo for South Africa 2010, for example, was designed around the idea of unity, using sweeping colours that combine to form the African continent while converging on the football. These logos signify cultural moments, and being a part of a cultural moment is what fans seek. It is precisely this sense of shared significance that many fans seem to find absent from the approaching tournament.

The World Cup is not only about culture, it is also a political beast of sizable proportions. In its worst forms, football has proved an effective way of bolstering support for authoritarian regimes and blinding the world to corruption and coercion. The World Cup itself is no stranger to political interference. Whether used to strengthen and unite Fascist Italy in 1934 or ran by a brutish authoritarian regime, the tournament has long struggled to keep a clean face to cover its dark underbelly. 

As the symbolic face of the tournament, the World Cup logo has often served as a façade to cover up cultural and political tensions. Decided upon by design committees, consultancy firms, and so-called ‘brand teams’, the World Cup logo is a powerful marketing device aimed at suspending the material, political, and social reality of the tournament, promoting the image of a world unified by the spirit of the game. However, at this year’s 23rd edition of the FIFA World Cup the curtains have been well-and-truly drawn back. 

Rather than projecting an image of a tournament defined by sporting merit and excitement, this World Cup’s logo serves as perhaps the most striking testament to its underlying commercial character. Since Sepp Blatter’s 17-year stint as FIFA president, beset with allegations of corruption, fans have felt a growing rot within the game as commercial interests begin to outweigh sporting spirit. The selection of the USA as primary hosts, the foils of dynamic ticket pricing, and the expansion of the tournament to 48 teams, have all contributed to the sense that this World Cup is a pinnacle of the game’s demise. This year’s logo does little to hide this. Its sterile numerical design and photo-realistic representation of the FIFA World Cup trophy bear greater resemblance to Apple campaigns than to tournament logos of old. 

While FIFA has adapted this design for the individual host cities, it seems more like a brand template than a thoughtful representation of sport or culture. The brainchild of a Toronto-based creative agency, the logo does little to acknowledge football fan culture, instead becoming just another feature of America’s corporate “logorama”. If the World Cup logo aims to summarise the tone of the games, symbolising the tournament’s message to the world, then this is a message of meaningless corporate greed and soulless commodities. The World Cup logo has been rendered plain and marketable, suiting a tournament that now holds those values at its core. 

And yet, this format is here to stay. ‘Johnny’ Infantino, as he is warmly referred to by President Trump, promises that all future tournaments will continue to use this numerical design to provide brand consistency, no matter the extent of fan outcries. Whatever excuse or justification one makes for such a decision, it always comes back to the same logic: business. For fans around the world, World Cups are not remembered for their revenue or marketability, but because of the cultural moment they created. It seems that for Mr. Infantino and motley mob, this is of little importance. FIFA is very much at risk of tearing out the game’s soul in order to grow its brand; once that soul is gone, one must ask what there remains to sell. 

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