London-based Ezra Collective’s second album Juan Pablo: The Philosopher was hotly anticipated by the group’s fans. With a sound that resists definition, the band’s influences range from jazz, hip hop, grime and afrobeat to reggae. Ezra Collective is made up of key members from London’s ‘new’ jazz scene, and features brothers TJ and Femi Koleoso on bass and drums respectively, Joe Armon-Jones on piano, Dylan Jones on trumpet and James Mollison on tenor sax.
Punchy afrobeat track ‘Juan Pablo’ wouldn’t be out of place in the depths of a basement club in London. The Philosopher showcases the Ezra Collective musicians by incorporating stop-chorus sections, enabling soloists to showcase their fresh improvising skills over breaks.
Preceded by a spacey, lilting trumpet interlude played by Dylan Jones, aptly named ‘Dylan’s Dilemma’, the introspective ‘People in Trouble’ is a world away from the usual upbeat vibes of Ezra Collective. To begin, echoing strings accompany the trumpet and the band enters gradually. Later, a driving bassline starts and creates an infectious groove alongside the drums and piano. Joe Armon-Jones bursts into a burning jazz piano solo, which is a highlight of the album.
To finish the EP, James Mollison launches into a sax interlude ‘James Speaks to the Galaxy’, which leads into ‘Space Is the Place’; an innovative, radical take on Sun Ra’s composition. With cosmic leanings and spiritual jazz influences, this track is a high contender for the star piece of the album.
Juan Pablo: The Philosopher places Ezra Collective as one of the most exciting bands on the current UK jazz scene, and points towards a sparkling future of genre-bending, new generation music. As with most jazz acts: best listened to live, this band should be seen, as well as heard.
Maybe your college bar is genuinely nice enough to pass for an actual pub, like Queen’s. Maybe your college drink has a legendary reputation, like the ‘Cross Keys’ of St Peter’s or the ‘Power Pint’ of Merton. Maybe it closely resembles a spaceship’s cafeteria, like my own beloved Keble. But college bars provide the ideal spot for an evening when you’re feeling lazy but still determined to exercise your right as a student to mid-week drinking.
Not everybody is equally committed to the demands and vagaries of the sesh, and that’s perfectly natural! It’s understandable that not all of us want to make a holy pilgrimage just to offer ourselves to the sesh gods at Park End. That’s where college bars come in – they’re here for us when we just can’t muster the energy for a proper night out.
If you’re a second or third year, you probably also want a place where you can drink while still dressed in the clothes you ate, slept, and cried in after yet another traumatising essay crisis. There’s no chance of running into anybody you’re chirpsing here, since you’ve already either got with or given up on any potentials from your own college. Therefore the college bar is the perfect half-way spot for being social: you don’t have to actually put any effort in, but you also don’t feel as ashamed as you would getting paralytic in your room by yourself (like you did last week).
The proximity of a college bar also provides a crucial health benefit. There is no way for you to be distracted by a kebab van on your way home if you’ve stayed in college: the siren’s call of late night cheesy chips will go unheeded. So in a way, getting so drunk at your college bar that you can’t make it out is the healthiest lifestyle choice you’ll ever make.
Against College Bars
Joanna Lonergan
College bars vary hugely between colleges – Balliol’s watering hole is famously good. The ‘Pango’ at Hertford has the potential to anaesthetise a medium-sized whale, while St John’s disappoints with the unimaginatively named ‘The St John’s College’. Someone obviously put a lot of thought into that. But even if you can overlook the standard 70s decor, make your way around the sticky bits of the floor, find a seat that doesn’t have a suspicious stain on it and be done by 11pm, you’ll still be in for what can only be described as a fairly average night.
Want to meet someone new? You won’t find them in your college bar. The college bar reinforces the divide between ‘town’ and ‘gown’. We’ll confine ourselves to this dimly lit room, and they’ll keep to their Oxford pubs – no eye contact has to be made, and certainly no mixing. It’s this exclusivity which is detracting from local business. There are over 23,000 students at Oxford – that’s a lot of potential business for the city’s locals, and much of this is being snatched by the college bars. Why would you hide yourself away in a dingy basement horribly close to the library, when you could break free and explore the many pubs and cocktail bars that Oxford has to offer?
Yes, the college bars are subsidised. Great. The ease of simply scanning your bod card means that even when you run out of cash you can keep drinking! But uh-oh, what’s this extra £60 on your ballot? You could have sworn you didn’t drink that much, but then again, you can’t really remember… All things considered, the college bar is an affront to Oxford’s wonderful pub scene: treat yourself and have a pint poured by someone who knows what they’re doing.
Next year marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most influential works of indie rock ever produced. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was first released in 1998 by Jeff Mangum, an independent musician from Athens, Georgia, with a passion for psychedelia and the circus, and since then Aeroplane has become something of a meme. Frequently cresting ‘top 10’ lists on /mu/, the music section of the infamous 4chan and a source of worryingly heated discussion for every musicophile with a top-knot, no matter your take on Aeroplane, you’ve got to admit it’s got something.
The first and most obvious thing to note about In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is that by any typical musical definitions, it’s really weird. Threnodic dirges rub shoulders with gruesome bagpipe lines, stomping out paeans which lead somehow into rasping ballads. The lyrical journey soaring and rising like the eponymous plane, all of it surprising and musically interesting but at the same time – and this, in my mind, is one of the really important things about this album – graphic in visceral and disturbing ways. According to the mythology that surrounds this album, Aeroplane is about Anne Frank. Songs titles like ‘Holland, 1945’, and lyrics like “and she was born in a bottle-rocket, 1929” support the idea, and while Aeroplane isn’t really about any one thing, the story of Anne Frank certainly serves as a consistent motif.
To condense Aeroplane down into one word is difficult, but one that comes to mind is ‘dreamlike’. The alternative hip-hop producer Boom Bip described Aeroplane as “the closest anyone has ever come to putting my dreams into music,” and this aspect of Aeroplane is acknowledged by Mangum in a 1997 Pitchfork interview, in which he said “a lot of the songs are influenced by my dreams.” To give an example, one of the most memorable lines in the album is “She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires /and retire to sheets safe and clean.” Something clashes in the line: tomatoes, soft and natural, and soft, clean bedsheets – indicative of childish innocence – are juxtaposed with radio wires, in all their metallic brutality. This conference of contradictory and disjointing images – which we sometimes see in dreams – represents in microcosm the way Magnum depicts the human experience.
Since Aeroplane’s release in 1998, Magnum has largely disappeared from the public eye, and rumours of a nervous breakdown persist. It’s difficult to come away from Aeroplane not at least slightly doubting the author’s sanity. In the long tradition of American artists who’ve disappeared – think Salinger or Pynchon – Magnum has been reluctant to speak much about this album, and he said in an email to a journalist in 2003 that he “just wants to be left alone.” It’s important that we respect this right, and allow him to have his peace. But 20 years on, Aeroplane hasn’t lost what originally drove the hype. It’s experimental, and weird, and most of all, difficult to exorcise from the mind or forget. Just as non-classicists should read the Iliad, or humanities students need to know about the laws of physics, non-fans of indie rock people should give Aeroplane a listen. It’s just under 40 minutes and free on YouTube. What more do you need to know.
From the moment that Jack arrived at the Turf, umbrella in hand (I was drenched from the rain), I knew that this was someone who had their shit together. When he revealed that he’d spent his summer in Panama volunteering at a legal access centre, I thought that was just unfair – some of us have to do banking internships, you know! Despite my initial feeling of inferiority, Jack did reveal one fault – despite living in Worcestershire (promising) he wasn’t in fact a farmer (disappointing). Luckily the evening was a good one – we bonded over sibling rivalries and sports, and managed to avoid the awkward silences which make a date feel more like a tute. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I had a better time on the date than I did trying to sum it up in this column.
What was your first impression?
The umbrella
Personality?
Really lovely
Any awkward moments?
Chat about the location of bathrooms in restuarants.
Jack Beadsworth
Third Year, Law
Corpus Christi
Prior to arriving at Turf, I had low expectations about the evening ahead. I mean, who in their right mind goes on a blind date organised by Cherwell? Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised when greeted by Juliet: tall, friendly, and dolled up – though sadly this wasn’t for me but for a 21st she was heading to afterwards. As opposed to the stereotypical blind date, there were no awkward silences and the conversation flowed right from the start – even getting the bartender and other customers involved in a lively conversation about girls using the universal male fear of periods to manipulate them to their advantage. The sparkling conversation then ranged from troublesome underage siblings losing our IDs to our shared desire to help the vulnerable (always a turn on): it was a lovely evening.
What was your first impression?
Too smart for a Love Oxland date
Personality?
Fearless and fun
Any awkward moments?
I thought for a moment she was a ruthless venture capitalist
Martin McDonagh is perhaps the closest thing Britain has to a living playwright-celebrity. Alongside Jez Butterworth and a precious few others, McDonagh’s name is one which, on its own, has the marketing power to sell out a 3-month run. His work is worshipped by west-end luvvies and Hollywood producers alike. On the morning before the opening night of this production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore for instance, it is announced that McDonagh’s new play will feature in the Bridge Theatre’s next season. The night before at the cinema, I also see a trailer for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his latest film, which has been widely tipped for Oscar glory since it opened at Venice this summer. The man is everywhere and, as a result, it seems Tightrope Productions couldn’t have made a shrewder choice for their latest project.
However, the fact that McDonagh exists very much within the mainstream of British theatre does not make his material any easier to work with. In fact, the action of Lieutenant is stuffed-full of things that make it a uniquely tricky script to put on with student-actors and a student-sized budget. Blood, guts, guns, dead animals, Irish accents – all provide serious obstacles for even the most experienced director, problems that must be solved in order for the play to succeed.
Lieutenant starts in the same acerbic style all its author’s plays do. “Do you think it’s dead Donny?” asks Davey, a young ginger-haired Galway lad, staring at the corpse of a cat. As soon becomes clear, the dead pet he surveys is not just any animal. It is, in fact, the corpse of ‘Wee Thomas’, the much beloved cat of Padraic, a terrorist from the IRA splinter group, INLA. The humour of the situation is thus imbued with something else. It makes us chuckle yes, but it also promises imminent violence, something both we and the characters onstage begin to dread. This seemingly innocent first-line is the catalyst for 80 minutes of brutal retribution and anarchy. It immediately sets the tone of the dark humour that ensues.
Indeed, this first scene is a good exemplum for both the main virtues and flaws of Lawford’s production. The cast is very talented and McDonagh’s black comedy is thrilling, every single gag structured to perfection. This language is a particular pleasure when delivered by Hugh Tappin. He, more than anyone else, has a brilliant sense of timing and the sustained confidence and ease with which he drops each punchline is impressive. Two other standouts include Chris Page and Kate Weir, who breathe life into the sometimes sweet, sometimes terrifying couple at the heart of the action. Cameron Spain also deserves a mention for maintaining the best accent and for the dry wit with which he uses it.
However, sharing the stage with this great company of actors when the light first comes up is also a plush-toy cat. It is obviously excessive to argue that the show should incorporate living animals into its production however the multiple toy-cats used to represent different felines throughout the play is somewhat jarring. One wonders why the actors could not have mimed holding an animal as an alternative to this feature that clearly detracts from our ability to engage with the piece. Similarly, it would have been impossible for Lawford to recreate the level of violence that the play demands but the use of audibly fake gunshots and too little fake blood means that the brutality sometimes loses its power to horrify or indeed entertain.
This may seem like a pedantic criticism, but McDonagh’s humour is so dependent on a philosophy of excess, of visual absurdity, of pornographic violence, that, whilst not all their own fault, Tightrope’s inability to realise this sometimes lets down the hyperrealism his language builds. On occasion, it disappointed me given the potential of the script and the actors clear ability to deliver it well.
Besides this, Lawford has an excellent understanding of pace and the play rockets by without any loss of energy. The whole of the O’Reilly’s space is used in imaginative ways to create different settings. With an admirably large audience for opening night, the house was filled with laughs throughout. Anticipation being what it is, it’s likely that the power team behind Tightrope Productions will do exceptionally well with this show and, by and large, they deserve it. I look forward to where they decide to take us next.
The Sgt. Pepper’s show beginning on the 14th and lasting until the 18th of this month at the Simpkins Lee Theatre should not be missed. The venue at Lady Margaret Hall will be host to a bold show which aims to capture the complexity of the seminal album, and of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein who died two months after the album was released in May 1967.
Intensely familiar to anyone that has ever turned on a record player or iPod, Pepper presents an explosion of innovation and variety within a cohesive whole, retaining the experimentalism of the band’s 7th studio album Revolver while not straying into the individualism that you can trace in the White album (although admittedly my favourite of the two). Under the headship of McCartney the album manages to sustain an intoxicating psychedelic feel, best seen in the infamous if brilliant ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. All the while still blending in the driving rhythms of ‘Getting better’ and music hall influences in the most typically English of Pepper’s tracks ‘When I’m 64’ (lovingly described by Lennon as ‘Paul’s Granny sh*t’).
Yet Pepper’s was a pathbreaker in more than its influences. It was a milestone of the band’s power to shape their own music, working with music producer Geoff Emerick. The complexity of tracks like ‘For the benefit of Mr Kite’ and ‘Within you, without you’, hauntingly beautiful with its assembly of classical Indian instruments, shows just how far the Beatles had come as a creative force since the salad days of ‘Please please me’. But more fundamentally, it helped reverse the hierarchy of the studio. Gone were the days where men like George Martin, the Beatles’ producer for their debut album, could be king behind the decks and decide the sound for them. Leading on from the experimentation seen in some of Revolver’s tracks like ‘Tomorrow never knows’ which achieved its distinctive rotary sound by using a revolving table and a wardrobe, Pepper would prove to later innovators like Led Zeppelin what was possible in the studio.
This album was never intended to be played live. The whole point of Pepper was that it marked the change from the Beatles as a touring band to a studio based band. An intensely complex sound bursting with innovation, production experience and a multitude of influences would seem like an insurmountable challenge. But Sgt Pepper’s show hopes to accomplish the impossible through the incredibly talented and dedicated Oxford Beatles, and the ten piece orchestra that will be accompanying them. Chris Bayne, co-producer of the show and member of the Oxford Beatles has transcribed each musical strain in the album to prepare the players for an intense 18-month practice period.
When Cherwell talked to bass player Riaz Ahmand (let us hope he ages more gracefully than Paul) he told us that while we can expect a faithfulness from the vocal harmonies, original instruments and samples, the Oxford Beatles want to “add something a little different” in tracks like ‘Strawberry Fields’- so keep an eye out for them. Giddy, yet optimistic from a technical rehearsal, Riaz was struck by the eerie but triumphant feeling of bringing this cultural bulwark out from its place in the studio and into the limelight again. For both the players and the fans, this will be a challenge, but one worth listening to.
You don’t need to be a Beatles fan to come to this gig. You don’t even need to know who the Beatles are to come to this gig! You only need open your mind. Open your mind to the positivity in the album, open your mind to making a connection with this living piece of cultural heritage that you’ll grow to love. Played alongside a powerful theatrical piece that doesn’t shy away from the darker side of manager Brian Epstein’s life, this show hopes to be the musical event of Michaelmas and even the year.
In an age where most younger generations are sourcing information from the social media, and are using these same platforms to communicate, the shape of our conversations are changing considerably. One in four people socialise more online than in person, and this figure is expected to rise. Yet the effect of this is broader than simply the decline of vocal, face to face conversation. The social media allows us to increase the amount of ‘friends’ we are exposed to, yet we are usually selecting these individuals. And mostly, where we may select, we tend to opt to communicate with people who are like-minded, who share our interests and who are largely the same age, and who are from a similar economic background. The result is that whilst we believe that we are communicating with others on an unprecedented level, the fact is that we are communicating with a narrow strand of individuals – people like ourselves.
It is a situation that almost reminds me of a Peter Serafinowicz sketch called ‘The Clone House’. ‘The Clone House’ is a parody of the Big Brother show, in which all of the housemates are effectively clones, and are all named ‘Stevie’. The housemates are virtually indistinguishable from each other, both in terms of their appearance and behaviour, yet the ‘Stevies’ themselves seem convinced that they are not.
Indeed, the ‘Stevie model’ of communication is appealing. Those who share similar views to ourselves are probably going to give us self-validation when we converse with them. The more people we speak to that are like ourselves, the more our views are authenticated, the more we assume everyone holds a similar opinion. However, the ‘Stevie model’, when placed in a real world context, has dangerous consequences. The most evident were political. ‘Unanticipated’ events in the last year, such as the vote to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US President, to name a few, had shaken the liberal elite. Yet their surprise was arguably a symptom of an underlying ignorance towards what people unlike ourselves are really thinking. We are thus cocooned in conversation with different animations of ourselves.
Theodore Zeldin is a renowned academic with fellowships at the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, and the European Academy. Later in his life, he developed an interest in conversation. He has written a book on the history of conversation, and founded an associated organisation, The Oxford Muse, that seeks to bring individuals from different backgrounds together to initiate conversation between them. I speak to him about the lack of interaction between individuals with different views, and how we can improve conversation in our everyday lives.
***
I begin by asking what he thinks is the importance of conversation. He doesn’t really answer my question, implying I should know conversation is important, and instead proceeds to explain why the importance of conversation is being ignored. “I know all you undergraduates spend a lot of time fiddling with Facebook, which is something that really distorts conversation.” He explains that the rise of social media as a form of communication has led our conversations to become less interesting and valuable. They leave us increasingly bored, and ultimately isolated. “Some say isolation is more dangerous than tobacco. We are isolated because we are losing sight of real conversation.”
I ask what ‘real conversation’ is. “Conversation is not about saying who am I, but who are you?”. Where we simply seek to uphold our own views in conversation, either by interacting only with the like minded or not listening to those expressing different views, we are not having a conversation we are “not learning anything. We get bored.”
I discuss how a lack of interaction with those who are unlike ourselves not only makes us isolated as individuals, but could also make our views isolated as a group of like minded people. Zeldin affirms that the trend towards specialisation in our education has strongly limited our ability to communicate beyond validating our own views. He describes UK universities as “training colleges”, admitting that those who teach us are very competent individuals in “their field”, yet they alone cannot make our lives enriching. We leave university with a very dense, yet narrow education. An Oxford alumnus himself, he complains how when you meet people at this institution in particular, which values selection and specialisation, “you look in a mirror.”
Zeldin adds that not only does this make ourselves, and our views more isolated, the substance of our conversations becomes unimaginative. If we are often discussing the same topics, we will often arrive at the same, stale conclusions. An interaction with a wide range of different subjects, as well as people, makes conversation worthwhile. He asks me when was the last time I engaged in a conversation about something I didn’t know much about. I recalled witnessing a conversation about darts, which I am not remotely interested in. He asks me what I did. I explained that I listened to the conversation for a few minutes, did not participate in it and politely excused myself. “You should have stayed – asked questions! It is equally worth participating in conversations about things we know little about more as those where we have a lot to say. These conversations are where you can learn something enriching, even if that might be about darts…”
I ask about his understanding of conversation as an historian. Were people always reluctant to engage with people unlike themselves? “In the past people had difficulty speaking. They were scared of being called ignorant.” Zeldin describes how the class system on trains was established not only because bourgeois travellers did not wish to sit amongst livestock, but also because both the working and middle classes were uneasy about speaking to each other for fear of making a bad impression. Similarly, he highlights that some customs asked that men did not look women in the eye when speaking to them, unless they were a woman of kin or their wife. Yet whilst we have broken many communication barriers, Zeldin believes that “we are now more ignorant than they, even when hierarchies are being dismantled and etiquette is less important in conversation than ever before.”
What is necessary, then, if we wish to shed our ignorance and engage in more enriching conversations? Zeldin speaks of a “fear of disagreement”. We are so frightened of interacting with individuals who may criticise us that we are becoming enslaved to our own ignorance. He suggests that we abandon this fear and be prepared to face criticism and even conflict in conversation. “Conversation is a means by which you expand your imagination. And the more you face friction, the more you enrich your imagination and the more you refine your ideas.”. He speaks to me about one of his memories when he was an undergraduate reading History at Oxford in the 1950s.
“There was a time when more or less every week, I would go to my tutorial and the tutor would ask me the same question. This was why ‘this or that’ had lost their power. Every week I would fumble about for a cursory answer, as most of us do in tutorials. Then when I finally plucked up the courage to challenge this tutor, I asked him why the loss of power was so important. Why are we always concentrating on power? Isn’t the failure to be an inspiration more of a loss than a lack of power?”
I ask him whether what he was trying to say with this anecdote was that the value of conversation is not a measurement of the extent to which we hold power in a conversation, or seek to undermine the power of the person with whom we are speaking. The value in a conversation is measured by our capacity to be inspired by the person we are speaking to.
“Yes, precisely that.”
As we close the interview, Zeldin asks me to come along to the Oxford Muse with some friends and learn how to have more worthwhile conversations.
I admire Zeldin for his efforts in uniting people through conversation with his organisation. Yet to me, it is almost sad that we must engage with an academic society to be taught how to have a proper conversation.
Instead, I think that this could be achievable in our everyday lives. Perhaps we can begin by moving away from the college bars, and going to a pub. Cutting down on the dull buzz of taking another Buzzfeed quiz about yourself and find out about someone else. Instead striking people other than our peers down with the same empty gusto of flicking down faces in a game of Guess Who, we could take a gamble. That way, we might be less bored when we return to our ‘clone houses’.
Born into an age of political and industrial revolution, William Hazlitt’s rise in the 19th century coincided with that of Romanticism. First a philosopher, Hazlitt was then a journalist, essayist, art critic, lecturer and political commentator.
Standing at the centre of the new culture which shaped his world, Hazlitt was personally acquainted with the likes of Keats, Lamb, Wordsworth, and Coleridge – whom he spent three weeks with in Somerset in 1798. It was as a critic that he was able to establish acclaim, and is still considered one of the greatest critics of his age – contributing drama, literary and political criticism to a new mass audience shaped by the invention of the steam press.
Indeed, Hazlitt was able to capture the essence of his changing times, with his ability to humanize and preference of real experience over abstraction a key feature of his essays. In On The Pleasure of Hating, Hazlitt posits the timeless idea that humans in fact love to hate, contextualising it as an important component of humanity. Perhaps one of the most notable quotes from this essay being: “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”
Passionate and intense, he was able to articulate well the issues of his era in breadth. A committed political liberal, he is reported to have wept when Napoleon abdicated. In his 1819 Political Essays, he wrote in hope of democracy and reform. It is perhaps of no surprise that he was mercilessly condemned by all Tory journals of his time.
His writing style is unpretentious, and many of his ideas seem to reflect resounding modern, and simply human concerns. Duncan Wu describes Hazlitt as the first modern man, and writes that Hazlitt: “Speaks to us of ourselves, of the culture and world we now inhabit.” In spite of his widespread acclaim as one of the greats of his era, many of Hazlitt’s works are now out of print.
This is not an attack on straight people. Sexuality is, after all, just one aspect of your character. It’s always difficult to write a piece like this without coming across as divisive – but this is not an “us” and “them” issue. We’re all human, we’re all on the same team, and we can all relate on some level.
That being said, there’s a discrepancy between us when it comes to queer spaces, an issue which only queer people are really in a position to fully appreciate. The problem here is not necessarily allies, or people who are questioning their heterosexuality and looking for answers.
The problem is straight people who are just here for the party. It’s a lot harder to be queer around straight people than it is around other queer people. Other queer people understand, to an extent, what you’ve been through, what you’re feeling, what it’s like to be queer in a straight society. Straight people do not.
Before I came to Oxford, I was outed to total strangers by some of my closest friends. It was scary and upsetting, but I knew they didn’t mean any harm by it: they just had no way of appreciating what a massive deal it was to me. Even after I explained, they didn’t understand why I was hurt: it’s 2017, everyone is cool with the gays now.
Even if that were true, it couldn’t take away the fear that it might change how people thought of you once they knew that you were different. It’s hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it, and we realise that. Just take my word for it: it’s so much easier to feel accepted when you know that you’re in a place designed for people like you, by people like you, with people like you.
Of course, there’s no practical way to enforce it. It’s not like our sexuality is printed on our ID cards. However good you think your ‘gaydar’ is, there’s no reliable way to tell who’s queer and who isn’t (much to the relief of many of our queer ancestors, I’m sure). All we can really do is ask nicely. Please: don’t come to queer events if you’re nothing to do with the LGBTQ+ community. If your idea of allyship is not being actively homophobic, you don’t really deserve to attend. And if you must, don’t act like you’re the saviour of the gays for attending.
Don’t use it to broadcast how wonderfully progressive you are. Don’t act disgusted because someone of the same gender hits on you. There are plenty of parties and plenty of clubs – if you come to the queer ones, I’m afraid you’re going to have to accept that this time, it’s not about you.
When walking through Oxford on a Saturday afternoon, it is impossible not to feel the sheer physical size of the University in its labyrinthine sprawl of colleges, libraries, and laboratories. Streets appear created without design, instead falling haphazardly as narrow alleyways and chasms between looming battlements and languishing quads. Whilst tell-tale signs of modernity have crept into central Oxford, the “dreaming spires” have not yet relinquished their spatial supremacy.
But it is sometimes easy to forget the level of land ownership that extends outside of the city walls. According to WhoOwnsEngland.org, in 2015 all the colleges were recorded to have an enormous £1.3 billion invested in property and in 1989, with 127,690 acres owned in total. The number of acres in 2017 fell due to sales, but Oxford University’s landholdings today are still considerable, to say the least. Such mass holdings are fairly anomalous nowadays, anachronistic remnants of England’s feudal past.
Neither do the colleges act like normal landlords. My paternal family are Oxfordshire based farmers, and have rented land from Exeter College since 1945. Since the beginning, the relationship has been less one of landlord and tenant, more of friendly association, one that is only ever mentioned with pride. It has been defined by tradition and stability rather than change, and, unlike the uncertainty that many domestic tenants feel, the agreement has always been defined by security. Living in a college-owned village, my aunt said, was to feel that someone clever was in control.
Yet transposing this archaic relationship into the 21st century has proven difficult. While in the past, housing developments on college owned land would never have been considered particularly newsworthy, the current climate has transformed the colleges’ land transactions from routine agreements to moral arbitration.
Colleges have come under increasing pressure to develop their land, not only from their budgets in the face of declining government funding, but also from Oxford City Council, who are constantly struggling to find suitable sites for new homes. Oxfordshire is one of the least affordable counties in the UK, with the city of Oxford in particular having a house price to income ratio of 11.56, according to West Oxfordshire’s most recent Local Plan.
This dearth of affordable housing in Oxford has become increasingly impossible to ignore. Recently, the local lack of affordable housing has been cited as the cause of Westgate finding it difficult to recruit, as potential workers have been priced out of Oxford’s commuter zones. The University themselves have also felt the pressure of Oxford’s housing shortage, with many dons finding it difficult to find their bearings in a highly competitive housing market.
My first encounter with the immense power Oxford colleges can wield was in the village of Lower Heyford, whose surrounding land is partially owned by Corpus Christi. For a village so near to Oxford – just 15 minutes on the train – it is surprisingly sleepy, with a mere 160 houses running alongside the canal path. As a consequence, this nondescript village was considered ideal for expansion.
The proposal put forward by Corpus Christi and the developer Bonnar Allan was posited as being part of the solution to Oxford’s housing crisis. A third of the proposed houses would have been termed “affordable”, that is for sale or rent at 80% of the market value. But the sheer scale of the village’s growth was completely unprecedented. 5000 houses were proposed to be built, a self-contained ‘settlement’ appended onto the village with its own school, doctor’s surgery and transport links. Over 100 members of the public turned out to reject the plans at a parish council meeting, an act of outcry perhaps not usually associated with balding retirees, but one which left Corpus powerless to follow through with its plans.
The arguments of the villagers that led the campaign against Corpus had more than a whiff of Nimbyism, the overriding message of this meeting apparently being ‘you are not wanted here’, according to the council minutes of the event. Such language could easily be construed as a middle-class fear of the riff-raff rather than any legitimate concerns about the integrity of village life. However, it is difficult to contend with the claim that the proposed change was clearly a move of gross insensitivity. The plans themselves were presented with an almost comical tone of false naïvety that grated with many of Heyford’s residents. Some burst into laughter when developers tried to convince them that the additional homes “would not add significantly to traffic flows”, the implication being that everyone would only use the improved train service.
Although the proposed demographic changes to the village could perhaps be considered inevitable, the speed at which such a change was put forward is rather alien to the ideals of co-operation and compromise. Even Corpus Christi, in their attempt to try and pitch the development, described Bonnar Allan as a “new and different kind of benign developer”, an unwitting Freudian confirmation of the villagers’ fears that some developers were acting like cancers, destroying the countryside under a concrete proliferation of identical homes.
Similar struggles between residents and colleges are alarmingly common, and a perceived aggressiveness on the part of the colleges is becoming more and more widely reported.
The Parish of Fyfield and Tubney has been historically linked with St John’s College since its founding in the 16th century, being part of the college’s original endowment. For centuries, the village has been a refuge for St John’s scholars during times of tension in the city, and Fyfield’s small church is lined with commemorations of past fellows.
Yet development plans for the tiny parish have caused animosity against the college to reach a fever pitch. Some residents have reportedly wanted to sever all visible ties with St John’s, to the point of advocating the renaming of local cul-de-sac St John’s Close. For despite the land around the parish being judged by the local authority as “unsuitable” for development, due to its lack of infrastructure and the land’s current greenfield status, St John’s College has continued to push through planning proposals, with the intention of adding 700 homes to the 185-home parish.
Tim Dougall, a representative of Fyfield Local Action Group (Flag), whose purpose is to prevent what they consider the pernicious impacts of the development, as their website read, “because someone has to”, said that it is primarily the college’s attitude towards the development that has stoked so much local anger. St John’s reportedly continued to insist that the residents’ reception of the planning proposal had been “favourable” despite their clear concern. Dougall also showed Cherwell documents that exhibited the college’s constant evasion of engagement with the local community. Instead of opening up discussion, the President of St John’s urged the campaigners to “liaise and communicate your concerns directly with Lioncourt and the local planning authority”, adopting an approach that has become symptomatic of the shift in St John’s and Fyfield’s relationship.
Much of St John’s planning agenda has been formulated with the help of the public relations company SP Broadway. Martin Harris, an ex-postgraduate researcher in Oxford and a member of the Oxford Green Belt Network, an organisation that campaigns to preserve and prevent the development of Oxford’s Green Belt, has criticised the colleges’ use of such companies at other sites.
Harris said these firms present a “biased case for building over on this important natural capital, denying that this is anti-social vandalism, and claiming that it is necessary to help more people in Oxford find homes nearer to their work.
“That is simply not true, nor is it justified by any objective evidence that I have seen; the motive is financial gain.”
Dougall was also quick to point out what he considers St John’s lack of integrity in promoting the development so forcefully. The college, the wealthiest in Oxford, would stand to make £85 million if the development application is successful, a huge sum that he felt highlighted the paltriness of St John’s spending on bursaries and outreach. St John’s was becoming “a property and investment company with a sideline in education,” he said.
Dougall is not the only one to publicly criticise the colleges. This January, the Oxfordshire Campaign to Protect Rural England announced that “Colleges’ greed puts Green Belt and city at risk”, raising concern over the 17,000 houses that are proposed to be built on Oxford’s Green Belt by 2031. Unlike the land at Heyford and Fyfield, this is land that is protected from development by law, despite the housing shortage in Britain. Christ Church, Magdalen, Brasenose, and Exeter have all come forward with plans to build directly onto these prime Green Belt sites.
Whilst outlying projects in Heyford and Fyfield could be seen as slightly marginal, the green belt, with its proximity to the city centre, is financially secure. Within the green belt, each hectare of farmland is approximately worth £12,000, but the asset value increases enormously if permission to build on the land is granted, rising to £2,000,000 per hectare. Successful planning permission thus massively increases the colleges’ rental income from these sites, with relatively little effort on their behalf – though it is worth noting that the land is only so expensive because of the scarcity of good housing near the city centre.
However, Martin Harris condemned the Colleges’ participation in the development of the green belt as “socially irresponsible”, particularly in regard to its effects on city dwellers’ physical and mental health. By building on the green belt, he explained, problems associated with congestion and air pollution can only be exacerbated.
Harris also explained that the University could even be disadvantaging itself as an institution in the long term by indirectly contributing to Oxford’s environmental decline – though he failed to note the perhaps much greater risk that the housing shortage would jeopardise the University’s ability to recruit the best minds.
“The campuses of many other universities in the UK, in the EU and in North America confidently offer excellent physical environments for study and learning, which are superior to that now found in central Oxford… this may become an important factor which unfortunately steers away talented but discerning people away from coming to Oxford,” he said.
But where does this leave affordable housing? Whilst the belief that houses need to be built is almost unanimously agreed upon, it is the location that is thus the crux of the issue. Bob Price, Labour city councillor, told Cherwell that he welcomed the colleges’ “growing interest in supporting the growth of new settlements.” He believes that the green belt, far from vivifying, is in fact “throttling” the city, and that by not building on it Oxford would be powerless to find a solution to the burgeoning crisis.
However, there is some question as to whether the developments are really providing the houses for the people who need them. The cost of enforcing below market prices means that building affordable housing is less than attractive from a profit perspective. Although Oxford City Council enforces a rule that 50% of all new developments must be ‘affordable’, this agreement is not binding on developers. As Ryan Hunt of South Oxfordshire District Council told to Cherwell, this figure is in fact fairly nominal and subject to change.
“This is a starting point for discussions between the developer and the council and the number can fall if the said number is considered not viable,” Hunt said.
What Hunt is referring to is the Viability Assessment, which Steve Akehurst in the New Statesman called a “trick” used by developers after a site has been secured as an excuse for building fewer affordable homes. After planning permission has been secured, developers often utilise the Assessment to claim that, due to ‘unforeseen’ circumstances, such as lower housing prices or increased building costs, their profit model no longer supports the original number of affordable homes.
According to Charlie Fisher, the problem is even worse on Green Belt sites because there is so much competition for the land, meaning vast amounts of money are required to secure bids.
He explained to Cherwell that last year an unexpectedly large sum was offered for a University site by developers. Charlie explained that the prospect for affordable housing therefore was discouraging – though he didn’t note the massively inflationary impact of the green belt itself on house prices near Oxford.
“It’s challenging to see how they could afford to pay so much for land AND provide the 50% affordable homes the city requires,” he said.
Fisher is a member of Oxfordshire Community Land Trust, and has been working with Homes for Oxford to provide not only permanently affordable homes in the city, but houses that are energy efficient and looked after by community members themselves.
One of their recent projects has been to bid for the brownfield Wolvercote Paper Mill site in May 2016, which is owned by the University. They planned to build 190 mixed tenure homes with a GP surgery and a lagoon. However, in the end their bid was unsuccessful.
“The problem is that the lawyers interpret charity law as meaning charity land disposals must go to [the] highest bidder,” said Fisher.
Nevertheless, he asserted that Oxford University has a “moral duty” to support affordable housing in Oxford, and should seek to give priority to those bidders that are committed to creative housing strategies.
A spokesperson for Oxford University said: “The University believes that responsible development of housing and employment sites within the green belt can, subject to independent review of their impact, provide for the sustainable growth of Oxford.”
The University’s part in development is thus a complex one, and lined with politically-toxic pitfalls. As an institution, Oxford is always going to be under close attention. If they continue to develop in this more aggressive manner, not only will their reputation with local residents falter, but its actions could also be detrimental to its status internationally.
But if they don’t continue to develop land, the British housing crisis will only get worse. There is not enough brownfield land in Britain to fix the housing crisis – at some point, parts of the Green Belt is likely to have to go.
At a time when the University most requires the support of others, it surely does not seem sensible to alienate those very people who have sustained it for centuries. But the University’s interests are fundamentally linked to a good supply of housing and good access to property. Local residents naturally have a right to protect their communities, but their wishes need to be balanced.
