Over the 9th and 10th of September, dozens of colleges across Oxford opened up to the public for the Oxford Open Doors Festival. Alongside colleges, the festival also saw various other buildings open their doors, including Oxford University Press, Examination Schools and the Randolph Hotel, with many also hosting free tours and exhibitions.
Of course, many of these colleges and buildings are technically open to the public normally, but with the caveats of restrictive opening hours, nominal entry fees and unenthusiastic porters. In contrast, the festival provided a very welcoming atmosphere for people to come in for free.
The event was co-ordinated by the Oxford Preservation Trust, a charity responsible for renovating various buildings around Oxford, including the Covered Market, and since its inception fifteen years ago, the annual festival has seen an ever increasing number of buildings taking part: this year saw over one hundred and twenty doors open for people to explore.
I was quickly struck by how nice it was to see large groups of people looking around the colleges, especially without the eyes we students have — I’ve always thought that there’s only so many times you can go to the Rad Cam mid-essay crisis before you stop looking up and appreciating how beautiful it is.
Regardless, as someone who’s a bit of a sucker for tourism, and who has always wanted to visit all of Oxford’s colleges, it provided a good excuse to tick a few off the bucket list. So myself and my friend decided to go for a wander…
St Peter’s
We began our tourist jaunt at St Peter’s. Saint Peter is said to guard the gates to heaven; the gates to St Peter’s College were guarded by a rather friendly porter. As we stepped through the Plodge, he welcomed us in and handed us a map. Walking into the first quad revealed dozens of fellow tourists also exploring the college grounds.
St John’s
After St Peter, we moved on to St John’s. Again, we were greeted by a very kind guide who had set up a table at the entrance to the college from which she dispensed guidebooks detailing some historical context on each of the quads. Did you know — for example — that the front quad originally belonged to the long-defunct St Bernard’s College? As a result, the original statue of St Bernard needed to be replaced with one of St John. Oxford colleges being well-known for their frugality, they decided they could save some money by not replacing the statue outright but converting it, which was achieved by sticking on a plaster beard. Again, something I’d never noticed through my student eyes, stumbling through the quad to a friend’s room at 3 am. Cracking stuff.
Like Peter’s, the college was a delightful collection of sandstone architecture. The wide, spacious gardens and the modern Garden Quad were particular highlights. The auditorium of Garden Quad hosted a lecture on the history of the college, and the room next door to that featured an exhibition on the layout of the garden. We quickly found that St John’s were hosting all sorts of exhibitions on esoteric topics of college history. They really went overboard with this stuff, including an entire room dedicated to maps cataloguing every single type of tree on the college grounds.
In addition to the exhibitions, the college also hosted a treasure hunt. I asked one of the helpers what you could win in this treasure hunt, and he grandly pulled back the sheet draped over the table he sat at to reveal a box filled with — as he put it — ‘St John’s tat’. There was an ample selection of water bottles and college merch to get your hands on.
Green Templeton
From St John’s, we strolled to Green Templeton. I’ve always found Green Templeton a bit enigmatic. As the guide on the door explained to us, the college stands on the site of the former Radcliffe Observatory. Thus, Green Templeton’s exhibitions focused on astronomy and the college’s history. It all reminded this author of a school fair: the college had hired out an ice cream van, which sat parked in the main quad, and along the lawn, they had assembled a variety of stalls showcasing models of telescopes and astronomy-themed games for children. Tour guides showed people up the college’s tower, with a rather exasperated woman warning everyone not to get too close to the bannister of the staircase in case it collapsed.
What the college lacked in structurally stable staircases, it made up for in views. The top observatory room of the tower, with its huge windows, provided a lovely view of Oxford. Perilously, we journeyed back down the staircase and exited the college to our next location…
St Hugh’s
By virtue of it being so far away, it seemed few people had come to visit Hugh’s. The college seemed abandoned. One of the few living souls we saw was a very nice man who sat at a table by the door and gave us a brief blurb of the history of the college — one of the first to admit women. He offered us a map, but only on the proviso that we give it back to him on the way out: he pointed to a rather paltry ‘stack’ of two maps on the table and explained that this was all he had left. It was unclear whether a huge group of tourists had come in that morning and cleared him out, or whether St Hugh’s had been so sceptical of anyone coming to visit them that they’d only printed two maps.
We wandered around the grounds of the college and around the garden, which felt somewhat like walking around the grounds of a stately home — albeit an abandoned one. We saw no one else there.
Then, while walking through one of the gardens, we detected life. We heard music and could smell the sizzling aroma of a barbecue. We followed our noses and ears to the source and stumbled through a hedge into a garden that was a veritable Eden of food and drink. At least two dozen people sat on deck chairs and at tables eating food. Finally, we thought, we’d found where everyone was! Staff moved up and down serving huge heapings of strawberries and cream, hamburgers sizzled on grills, people carved up slices of delectable-looking chocolate cake. In the corner of the garden, a brass band played. We were a bit confused as to why they hadn’t advertised this when we came in. It put the other college’s offerings to shame.
With our stomachs rumbling, we wandered towards one of the grills to help ourselves to some food… only to glimpse a sign saying ‘Staff Barbecue’. We were soon shooed away.
Thus ended our time at St Hugh’s.
Overall, the Oxford Open Doors Festival provided a great opportunity to get another perspective on many of the buildings that form the backdrop to our everyday lives in Oxford. It was a lovely experience, and I’ll certainly be going next year. Next time, though, I’ll be wearing a shirt and tie, in order to better crash the St Hugh’s staff barbecue…
Sunak’s rollback on climate and the economy
Rishi Sunak’s speech on Wednesday evening was the perfect representation of just about everything wrong with his government. Here was a political leader, hastily strong-armed into policy announcements by leaks, rolling back pledges key for both our climate and our economy all whilst preaching the values of ‘long-term decision making’. As the UN secretary-general called for developed countries to accelerate their race to net zero in New York, Sunak not only jeopardised Britain’s chances of doing so by 2050 but simultaneously sparked outrage in the business community. One thing that is accelerating is the rate at which the UK is quickly becoming the laughingstock of the West.
I feel like I should preface this piece by making it clear that I am far from a passionate climate campaigner. I have never attended a climate march, I’m not vegan, and the house I live in does not have a heat pump (more on that later). The key thing about ‘bringing people with you’, as the right wing of the Conservative Party like to say, is that this is about far more than our planet. Clearly, wildfires, flash floods, and other extreme weather events highlight the damage and potential disaster of missing climate targets. But even more pressing, especially for a Britain outside of the EU, is the economic argument. That is an economic argument that the government is very much losing.
Let us cast our eyes back to the coalition government of 2013 and the promise to ‘cut the green crap’, as David Cameron so eloquently put it. Back then, the cuts to spending on everything from wind subsidies to energy-saving improvements in homes were welcomed joyfully by much of the tabloid press. Now, with the spectre of energy security looming after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, those cuts are costing British households hundreds of pounds every year.
Still, post COP 26 and Boris Johnson’s otherwise disastrous tenure in Downing Street, there was some hope that Britain could be at the forefront of a renewed ‘green revolution’. Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act set the standard, and although businesses have been calling for a more aggressive UK push, they have quietly been committing to British industry.
This might be due to Britain’s ability to stand out from the EU, something that the very same Brexiteers cheering today never seem to stop reminding us of. Of course, Britain would have had all the freedom in the world to ban electric cars by 2030 if it were still inside the EU, but the bloc’s compulsory shift to 2035 had seen companies such as Stellantis and Volkswagen focus on UK markets.
Ford has already invested £430 million in upgrading UK plants to produce electric vehicles. Their UK chair, Lisa Brankin, said: “Our business needs three things from the UK government: ambition, commitment, and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three.” Stellantis issued a statement saying that “clarity is required from governments”, and the head of the RAC noted that the policy change risked “slowing down the momentum the motor industry has built up in switching to electric”. The unanimous agreement of industry is striking: while they might normally be reluctant to directly criticise government policy, the automotive industry has been almost unified in its dismay.
Of course, petrol wasn’t all that Sunak wanted to talk about in his press conference. In fact, he fairly superbly set out the reasoning for a general election. A call for an ‘informed national debate’ was framed by an argument that governments shouldn’t be making such big decisions that haven’t been voted for. Of course, while Sunak himself has no mandate, the pledge to reach net zero by 2050 was in the Conservative manifesto during the last general election after Theresa May signed it into law in her dying days in office. It is also worth bearing in mind that in 2019 Boris Johnson declined to attend the Channel 4 ‘Climate Debate’. It may seem rich to some then that now the party complains there hasn’t been one on a national stage…
The Prime Minister also took the opportunity to throw in statements that came very close to utter fabrications. Sunak framed in his speech that he was ‘scrapping’ suggestions of a meat tax, a tax on long haul flights, compulsory lift-sharing to work, and seven-bin recycling. All are ideas that are in the ether and discussed by those who want to move fastest on climate change; some even came from the IPCC recommendations earlier this year. None of them have ever come close to even being suggested as policy by either of the two major parties.
It is true that there are some areas where changes did need to be made to government policy, and heat pumps and boilers are the perfect example of that. It is just an unfortunate fact of our energy grid that in some rural areas gas is not an option and, in some settings, heat pumps are not sufficient or cost-effective. Allowing these households to keep oil boilers for the time being is altogether sensible. Even more sensible and in keeping with the new slogan, ‘long-term decisions for a brighter future’ (not that catchy, is it), would be to stop giving housing contracts to companies that aren’t using heat pumps and proper insulation today. Of course, that seems a step too far.
The headlines around the world are even more demonstrative of how detached from global sentiment Sunak is. El País calls it “una marcha atrás”, the New York Times “a weakening”, and Le Monde “une repoussé des measure clés”. As I write this, the UN is gathering in New York for a climate summit: Sadiq Khan and Alok Sharma have both said that these roll-backs are ‘being discussed’.
The Prime Minister still claims the UK will reach net zero by 2050. This is perhaps the crux of the issue – he cannot simply wish that goal into being. Relaxations here will mean stricter and more dramatic cuts elsewhere: none of that is going to ‘bring the British people with him’. If the stakes weren’t so high, this desperate throw of the political dice would be laughable. As it is, it’s depressing and terrifying.