Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

I'm not saying that these things are bad or boring or misguided, merely that their full value and appeal yet eludes me. Into this category, I would also tentatively insert Oxford.

I have the greatest respect for the university and its 800 years of tireless intellectual toil, but I must confess that I'm not entirely clear what it's for, now that Britain no longer needs colonial administrators who can quip in Latin. I mean to say, you see all these dons and scholars striding past, absorbed in deep discussions about the LeibnizClarke controversy or postKantian aesthetics and you think: Most impressive, but perhaps a tad indulgent in a countrywhere there are 3 million unemployed and the last great invention was cat'seyes? Only the night before there had been an item on News at Ten in which Trevor McDonald had been radiant with joy to announce that the Samsung Corporation was building a new factory in Tyneside which would provide jobs for 800 people who were willing to wear orange boilersuits and do t'ai chi for a halfhour every morning. Now call me an unreconstructed philistine, but it seems to me and I offer this observation in a spirit of friendship that when a nation's industrial prowess has plunged so low that it is reliant on Korean firms for its future economic security, then perhaps it is time to readdress one's educational priorities and maybe give a little thought to what's going to put some food on the table in about 2010.

I remember once years ago watching a special international edition of University Challenge between a team of British scholars and a team of American scholars. The Britishteam won so handily that they and Bamber Gascoigne and the studio audience were deeply, palpably embarrassed. It really was the most dazzling display of intellectual superiority. The final score was something like 12,000 to 2. But here's the thing. I am certain beyond the tiniest measure of doubt that if you tracked down the competitors to see what has become of them since, you would find that every one of the Americans is pulling down $350,000 a year trading bonds or running corporations while the British are studying the tonal qualities of sixteenthcentury choral music in Lower Silesia and wearing jumpers with holes in them.

But don't worry. Oxford has been preeminent since the Middle Ages, and I am sure that it will remain so long after it has become the University of Oxford (Sony UK) Ltd. The university, it must be said, has become infinitely more commercialminded. At the time of my visit, it was just finishing a successful, fiveyear, .340million fundraising campaign, which was most impressive, and it had learned the value of corporate sponsorship. If you look through the prospectus you'll find it littered with references to things like The AllNew Shredded Wheat (No Added Sugar or Salt) Chair of Eastern Philosophy and the Harris Carpets WhyPayMore Thousands of Rolls in Stock at Everyday Low Prices School of Business Management.

This business of corporate sponsorship is something that seems to have crept into British life generally in recent years without being much remarked upon. Nowadays you have the Canon League, the CocaCola Cup, the EverReady Derby, the Embassy World Snooker Championships. The day can't be far off when we get things like the Kellogg's Pop Tart Queen Mother, the Mitsubishi Corporation Proudly Presents Regents Park, and Samsung City (formerly Newcastle).

But I digress. My gripe with Oxford has nothing to do with fundraising or how it educates its scholars. My gripe with Oxford is that so much of it is so ugly. Come with me down Merton Street and I will show you what I mean. Note, as we stroll past the backs of Christ Church, the studied calm of Corpus Christi, the soft golden glow of Merton, that we are immersed in an architectural treasure house, one of the densest assemblages of historic buildings in the world, and that Merton Street presents us with an unquestionably becoming prospect of gabled buildings, elaborate wroughtiron gates and

fine seventeenthand eighteenthcentury townhouses. Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their facades (something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside) but never mind. They are easily overlooked. But what is this inescapable intrusion at the bottom? Is it an electrical substation? A halfway house designed by the inmates? No, it is the Merton College Warden's Quarters, a little dash of mindless Sixties excrescence foisted on an otherwise largely flawless street.

Now come with me while we backtrack to Kybald Street, a forgotten lane lost amid a warren of picturesque little byways between Merton Street and the High. At its eastern extremity Kybald Street ends in a pocketsized square that positively cries out for a small fountain and maybe some benches. But what we find instead is a messy jumble of doubleand tripleparked cars. Now on to Oriel Square: an even messier jumble of abandoned vehicles. Then on up Cornmarket (avert your gaze; this is truly hideous), past Broad Street and St Giles (still more automotive messiness) and finally let us stop, exhausted and dispirited, outside the unconscionable concrete eyesore that is the University Offices on the absurdly named Wellington Square. No, let's not. Let's pass back down Cornmarket, through the horrible, lowceilinged, illlit drabness of the Clarendon Shopping Centre, out on to Queen Street, past the equally unadorable Westgate Shopping Centre and central library with its heartless, staring windows and come to rest at the outsized pustule that is the head office of Oxfordshire County Council. We could go on through St Ebbes, past the brutalist compound of themagistrates' courts, along the bleak sweep of Oxpens Road, with its tyre and exhaust centres and pathetically underlandscaped ice rink and car parks, and out onto the busy squalor of Park End Street, but I think we can safely stop here at the County Council, and save our weary legs.

Now none of this would bother me a great deal except that everyone, but everyone, you talk to in Oxford thinks that it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with all that that implies in terms of careful preservation and general liveability. Now I know that Oxford has moments of unutterable beauty. Christ Church Meadow, Radcliffe Square, the college quads, Catte Street and Turl Street, Queens Lane and much of the High Street, the botanic garden, Port Meadow, University Parks, Clarendon House, the whole of north Oxford all very fine. It has the best collection of bookshops in the world, some of the most splendid pubs and the most wonderful museums of any city of its size. It has a terrific indoor market. It has the Sheldonian Theatre. It has the Bodleian Library. It has a scattering of prospects that melt the heart.

But there is also so much that is so wrong. How did it happen? This is a serious question. What sort of mad seizure was it that gripped the city's planners, architects and college authorities in the 1960s and 1970s? Did you know that it was once seriously proposed to tear down Jericho, a district of fine artisans' homes, and to run a bypass right across Christ Church Meadow? These ideas weren't just misguided, they were criminally insane. And yet on a lesser scale they were repeated over and over throughout the city. Just look at the Merton College Warden's Quarters which is not by any means the worst building in the city. What a remarkable series of improbabilities were necessary to its construction. First, some architect had to design it, had to wander through a city steeped in 800 years of architectural tradition, and with great care conceive of a structure that looked like a toaster with windows. Then a committee of finely educated minds at Merton had to show the most extraordinary indifference to their responsibilities to posterity and say to themselves, 'You know, we've been putting up handsome buildings since 1264; let's have an ugly one for a change.' Then the planning authorities had to say, 'Well, why not? Plenty worse in Basildon.' Then the whole of the city students, dons, shopkeepers, office workers, members of the Oxford Preservation Trust had to acquiesce and not kick up a fuss. Multiply this by, say, 200 or 300 or 400 and you have modern Oxford. And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, wellpreserved cities in. the world? I'm afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.