The Bovadium Fragments, page 5
WORKER AT THE COWLEY CAR PLANT A further demographic factor which the motor industry introduced to the city related to immigration. The insatiable demand for workers was met, in part, through encouraging migration from former Empire nations in South Asia and the Caribbean, introducing diversity into the city’s ethnic mix, and bringing new occupants to the housing estates created with the motor industry in mind.
All of these changes built new communities, largely of working or lower middle class households in east Oxford, and with them community identities which would be contrasted for decades to come with the more genteel suburb of North Oxford, traditionally associated with the households of academics. These new urban (or perhaps suburban) identities, centred around Cowley, played into town planning discussions which would become an important factor in proposals for altering the flows of traffic, issues that would motivate Tolkien to write the Bovadium Fragments: ‘it neither became the basis for a totally new Oxford, nor did it attain a full and independent identity separate from the old city.’[14]
The new industry, and the new identity for east Oxford that it created, brought the poet John Betjeman to identify three Oxfords: Christminster (the historic county town), University (for obvious reasons) and ‘Motopolis’. ‘To escapists, to arty people like the author of these pages,’ he wrote, ‘the internal combustion engine is, next to wireless, the most sinister modern invention … that its most successful manifestation in England should be at Oxford, of all places, passes belief.’ Betjeman did, however, recognize the benefits that the industry brought to many: ‘the most arty of us must hand it to William Morris the Second. He has given employment to thousands, and money to millions; he has provided a cheap means of transport to hundreds of thousands.’[15] To Betjeman these changes were directly linked to the Morris factory: ‘The fate of Oxford has been the fate of most country towns. But there is no doubt that the Morris Motor Works have helped to make the transformation so rapid and complete.’ To add insult to injury, Betjeman added: ‘Cambridge, for instance, comparatively unblessed by industrialism, still retains its character.’[16] Betjeman, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalen in the 1920s, was not alone among those regretting the rise of the motor car. Several articles appeared in the Oxford Magazine by angry dons in the 1930s and L.R. Phelps spoke for many when he wrote of ‘the roar of traffic in the main streets is in painful contrast to the peace of the old days.’[17]
The rise of the city’s industrial prowess, and the changes to its social structure and topography that were brought about by this growth had, consequently, a profound impact on traffic in the city. This was especially felt in the old city, with its complex arrangement of small streets, alleys and vennels, which all combined to form the highly attractive centre, the atmosphere that Talbot had so lauded in the 1840s.
TRAFFIC CONGESTION AT CARFAX The growth in traffic had started to become a major issue for the occupants of the colleges and houses in the old city as the new century dawned, associated particularly with the rise of the motor bus. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s work Roverandom, which was conceived in 1925 while the family were briefly living in Leeds but not written up until 1927, the dog Rover (turned into a toy dog called Roverandom by a wizard) has numerous extraordinary adventures (including visiting the dark side of the moon), but is assailed on his way home by the fumes and noise of heavy traffic.[18] The story gives us a sense at this early date of Tolkien’s antipathy toward the motor car:
‘Motor after motor racketed by, filled (Rover thought) with the same people, all making all speed (and all dust and all smell) to somewhere.“I don’t believe half of them know where they are going, or why they are going there, or would know if they got there,” grumbled Rover as he coughed and choked; and his feet got tired on the hard gloomy, black roads.’[19]
Alfred Denis Godley (1856–1925), an Oxford Classics don at Magdalen College and a celebrated minor poet, was moved to write light comic macaronic verses in 1914, entitled ‘The Motor-Bus’, which were published in the Oxford Magazine and which complained of the impact of these new forms of public transport on the scholarly tenor of the High.
What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
The poem continues along similar lines until ending with
Domine defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos![20]
or: Lord defend us from these motor buses.
Tolkien may well have read this poem in the pages of the Oxford Magazine (a publication aimed at members of the University and written by dons, for the most part) while he was an undergraduate, but it remained a popular piece of verse in the city and the University long afterwards. A finely printed version of it, produced by the Sampson Press in 1927, can be found preserved in the Tolkien archive, filed along with the drafts of the Bovadium Fragments. It clearly struck a chord with Tolkien in 1927, chiming with his critique of the motor car expressed in the early versions of what would become Roverandom.
We can also get a sense of Tolkien’s scathing view on modernity as it affected the built environment in Oxford from the drafts of the Andrew Lang Lecture that he was invited to give at the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1939, but which were written earlier in that year, and would eventually be published as On Fairy Stories in 1964. One passage (from an unpublished draft) in particular conveys his disgust for the march of modernity and the way in which change was so warmly embraced by some of his colleagues in the University:
UNDERGRADUATE LEAVING THE EXAMINATION SCHOOLS ON THE HIGH STREET ‘An Oxford don – incredible though it may sound – not long ago declared that he “welcomed” the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought the University into “contact with real life”. He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the kind of demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it’s not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression “real life” in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist.’[21]
Oxford Replanned
Godley’s humorous verse was based on a real-world problem, one of which the academic communities based in the colleges on the High Street were especially aware. Godley was a don at Magdalen College, and would only have to walk out of the college itself to experience the impact of the increased volumes of traffic crossing Magdalen Bridge, and travelling up and down the High Street, to and from the centre of Oxford and the shopping streets and markets; to this could be added the railway station which had been newly built on the west side of the city.
The historian Alan Bullock (writing in the early 1960s when he was both Master of St Catherine’s College and Vice Chancellor) summed up the view of many about the city that Oxford was ‘… no longer the staid and sleepy university town of the nineteenth century, but a busy, crowded centre for an industrial population drawing its prosperity from the motor car factories at Cowley and spending lavishly in the chain stores which line Cornmarket.’The impact was felt most keenly, thought Bullock, on two of Oxford’s most famous streets, The High and St Giles. Bullock regarded St Giles as having become an improvised car park, while the famous curve of the High ‘is only to be appreciated on those rare occasions such as early Sunday morning when there is a pause in the incessant noisy flow of traffic.’[22]
CARS ON BROAD STREET A local historian, Lawrence Dale, came up with a plan in 1942 to rectify the growing problem. His plan was circulated as a small pamphlet called Christ Church Mall: A Diversion, which he published under the pseudonym ‘Carfax’. In this little pamphlet Dale, then in his late fifties, summarized the problem in light, mocking tones:
Have you ever been for a walk on Christ Church Meadow? No you have not; round it perhaps, by courtesy of the Dean, but not on it; the public are not allowed access to the Meadow.
The Meadow must have belonged to the Priory of St Frideswide, and its successor, the House, from time immemorial … which is of course the argument for the cows and the grass and the railings remaining just as they always have been in saecula saeculorum.[23]
The author critically identified the chief issue:
Now industry has raised its head in the east and commerce in the west (together with a railway station) and traffic of another kind possesses the street. Study is disturbed and the studious perturbed have to make undignified dashes under murderous wheels.The cobbles have been replaced by tarmac …
In the meantime the cows continue to chew the cud in Christ Church Meadow.
He came up with a solution to the problem, one which brought modern ideas about town planning to accommodate new ways of living together in the city with the preservation of as much of the old ways as were feasible: a new road across the meadow:
It is beyond question that the complaint that Oxford suffers from is arterio-sclerosis – the ancient arteries can no longer cope with the life that surges through them.To widen the arteries is to destroy that which we would preserve. Holywell for instance is threatened. A supplementary road running East andWest is the only possible cure and across the Meadow the only possible route.
Three years later Dale came into the open and wrote a slightly longer piece under his own name, published by Faber, an important London publishing house. Towards a Plan for Oxford City was a much more serious intervention than his previous locally produced pamphlet, even though it retained its slightly mocking tones. ‘I fly a kite,’ he wrote: ‘That is how I got into disgrace. I flew a kite in Christ Church Meadow. It was September 1941. It was quite a small kite, a little six-page pamphlet entitled Christ Church Mall: A Diversion in which I contrasted the fortunate circumstances of the cows in the Meadow, frisking in sixty-six acres of perfect peace, with the misfortunes of the Members of the University whose noble High Street was filled with an intolerable torrent of traffic.’ To this extent he identified with the problems outlined in 1914 by Godley, and which were made much worse in the interwar period by the rise of the Cowley car plant and the growth of the suburban population there. Dale’s intention was to preserve the quiet atmosphere of the High, by untangling its centuries-old traffic routes:
the famous High Street itself, the axis of the University, being the only connecting link between east and west; and the University, which had come to Oxford because of the seclusion it offered, found itself severed by a stream of traffic that entirely destroyed its scholarly quiet. Not only did the town sever the University, but the University cut the Town into two halves…. The immediate need of Oxford would seem clearly to be the removal of this entanglement, to smooth out the traffic, to reintegrate both the town and the gown, so they both enjoyed what was necessary to them.[24]
MAGDALEN COLLEGE TOWER FROM NEW COLLEGE GARDENS His solution, however, would set in motion a series of political, social and academic disputes that would take three decades to be resolved and would divide those in both the city and the university, and would involve multiple reports, public inquiries, and even discussion in Cabinet.
The Sharp Plan
Oxford City witnessed tremendous growth in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1901 the city held 49,000 people in its administrative boundary, in 1921 the population had been just over 67,000, but by 1941 it had grown to over 108,000.The topographical constraints of the city meant that this extra body of people were accommodated by the building of suburbs in East Oxford (in close connection to the Cowley Car Works) and in Botley, Marston, and Linkside, where the growing middle classes could mingle: office workers, council and hospital staff, alongside the Dons who were shunning the large, cold Victorian houses of North Oxford, which had been designed for an age where most middle-class households had servants.The middle classes of the 1950s and 60s were beginning to lead lives without these benefits.
GROWTH OF OXFORD FROM SHARP’S PLAN Many towns in 1950s Britain faced the future with optimism. The hardships of the inter-war years, and the ravages of the War itself were beginning to recede, and ahead lay a new society, one that was modern, forward-looking and embracing of technology. The social constraints which the War had helped to dislodge were further unsettled by the influx of new ideas about urban design and town planning pioneered by European architects and designers such as Le Corbusier, whose influence was felt on a generation of British urban designers, architects and town planners such as Percy Johnson Marshall and Robert Matthew; around this time the concept of townscape as opposed to landscape came to influence this new discipline, with its post-war modernizing energy.[25] Lawrence Dale’s ideas for how to solve the traffic and congestion crisis in Oxford were taken forward by the Oxford City Council’s consultant, another of the major figures in post-war British town-planning, Thomas Sharp.
Sharp (1901–1978) was, by the time he was appointed by the City Council in May 1945, a celebrated Town Planner. Born in County Durham he spent many years in the University’s architecture department (then based at Newcastle), where he published a series of important books, including the influential Town Planning (1940). After a period based in London working for the Ministry of Works and Planning during the war, he then returned to town planning serving as a consultant on planning issues for several English towns including Exeter, Salisbury and Chichester. From 1945 onwards he was hired as a consultant by the Oxford City Council, working to develop a coherent, comprehensive new plan for the city, dealing especially with the issues caused by traffic congestion. After three years of work, his plan (which he described as an ‘outline’) was published as Oxford Replanned in 1948.[26] Little did he realize the extent of public rancour that his plans would elicit over the coming three decades, although he must have been very conscious of them, as he had moved his consultancy and his home to North Oxford.[27]
Although Oxford Replanned was a report commissioned by the City Council, it circulated widely in published form as a book of over 200 pages, produced and distributed by the Architectural Press in London. The volume was printed to high standards, given that war-time rationing and other restrictions on paper and other elements of the publishing industry remained in force until 1949.The book was heavily illustrated with both historic engravings and newly-commissioned photography. Especially powerful were the many diagrams and maps, often in colour, which accompanied and explained Sharp’s narrative. The book provides a closely argued, and copiously illustrated, account of the historic growth of the townscape of Oxford, looking at broader social issues such as demographic change, and the growth of housing and industry. His study was combined with an analysis that showed carefully considered judgement on architectural and aesthetic grounds, examining issues concerning the city’s built environment such as the optimal materials and textures that have been used to great effect in Oxford, as well as the play of light on the famous Oxford stone. More importantly, Sharp’s work also brought forward proposals on how to develop the city into the future, with a focus on traffic planning.
Oxford Replanned contains no fewer than fifty-two ‘main recommendations’, some of which were broadly welcomed, but others, including limiting the City’s population to 90,000 were always going to be unworkable. It was, however, the motor car that was central to his overall planning vision, including some very big ideas indeed, such as the wholesale relocation of the Oxford motor industry to the Midlands. The damage wrought by the motor-car was the key element of his plan: ‘A heavy concentration of traffic is threatening to break down the entire organisation of Oxford as a centre of civilised life’, he laid out in his plan. Tolkien would most likely have agreed with such a diagnosis. Sharp’s focus on the position of the High within the topography of the City gave his ideas of solving the traffic problem a fulcrum from which all of the other elements would follow: ‘it is the backbone of University life.’[28] Sharp’s analysis moved logically to suggest a road across Christ Church Meadow, which he termed ‘Merton Mall’:
THE ROAD ACROSS CHRIST CHURCH MEADOW – FROM SHARP’S PLAN ‘One of the main proposals in this plan is the road which it is proposed should run from the Plain, east of Magdalen Bridge, alongside the BroadWalk … to cross St Aldate’s below Christ Church. It has been called Merton Mall for purposes of identification. This proposal may cause bitter controversy. But it is the only possible means of relieving the mad traffic congestion in the High Street and of bringing some peace back into the old heart of the city. And it need not involve any destruction to the beauty of Christ Church Meadow, Broad Walk, or Merton Field. On the contrary, the new road could add to the beauty of those famous features of Oxford and would display it to far more people than ever see it now …’[29]
