The plan for a road across Christ Church Meadow, as a means of alleviating traffic on the High, had already been established by Dale, and was now brought forward as the key to unlock the City’s traffic problem by Sharp, in a much more thorough and considered way; but under his plan it also became part of a whole series of integrated schemes to reroute traffic through new roads. These included the completion of the outer ring road bypass (known today as the Oxford Ring Road) that was intended to operate in tandem with improvements to the arterial routes in and out of the city. These routes were themselves designed to operate with the new inner relief roads, of which the Meadow Road was the critical element (having been a part of the city’s own dialogue dating back to 1941 and Lawrence Dale’s original notion). The plan would eventually include another proposed new road from the Marston Road across the University Parks, to emerge in St Giles, requiring the demolition of the Lamb and Flag pub (a much-loved hostelry). The Meadow Road was also linked to a new road through the city from St Aldate’s (where the Meadow Road was intended to emerge), across to the Railway Station, helping to give the people of east Oxford easier access to the railway network.

  SHARP’S PROPOSED NEW ROAD LAYOUTS The northern Inner Relief Road (as it was sometimes called) through the University Parks would become, for a time, even more controversial than the Meadow Road plan. Its proximity to the science department in the growing science area of the University based either side of South Parks Road produced outraged comments from that part of the Oxford academic community, with assertions being made that many of the scientists would leave the University if the plans for the road went ahead.

  Sharp’s plans were initially given a broad welcome. The report’s publication was accompanied by a public exhibition of the proposals. Sharp issued his ideas to the city and to the world with a challenge: ‘it is now for the citizens of Oxford, and for all those who love the city and have its future at heart, to decide what shall be done. The city is their charge. Theirs is the responsibility for the future.’[30] A reviewer in Planning Outlook felt that ‘in analysing the urban scene in language understandable by the citizen Mr. Sharp has done much to widen the layman’s appreciation of old Oxford; Oxford the work of art and national heritage’.[31] The young scholar J.N.L. Myres, who would later become Bodley’s Librarian, reviewing the book in Oxoniensia regarded it as ‘lively, intelligent, original, far-sighted, and extremely provocative’; he went on to doubt ‘whether any book about Oxford has ever stimulated so many people to write and think so much about the city’. He also pointed out that the vast majority of comment had focussed on just a few of the more controversial proposals, including ‘Merton Mall’ and the ‘plan for a new road along the northern margin of the Parks’, and that much else in the book had been overlooked. He confessed, however, that these were ‘matters of first importance for Oxford’s future’, and therefore deserved the attention they had received.[32] On 4 May 1947 at a debate in the Oxford Union, the motion was carried that ‘this House welcomes Dr Sharp’s proposals for the replanning of Oxford.’[33]

  From Merton Mall to Sandys Mall

  The Sharp plans, discussed and debated as they were, took a major step forward thanks to the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947. This required local authorities to submit a Development Plan to the Minister within three years. Given the state of the nation after the war, this was a tall order, and the Oxford City response was not submitted until 1953. This did not originally include the main Sharp proposals relating to the inner relief roads. The Minister at the time, Duncan Sandys, asked for a resubmission so that measures to relieve the city centre from excessive traffic could be included. Sandys, like many in the Conservative administration at the time, was Oxford educated, having been an undergraduate at Magdalen College, and even though he graduated in 1929, the traffic congestion on the High was severe enough by then to have left its mark on the budding politician.

  PROPOSALS FOR MERTON MALL AND OTHER ROADS On 27 August 1955 the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, then a don at Christ Church, wrote to his friend the art historian Bernard Berenson, giving him news from Oxford. The Meadow Road was the major news, and Trevor-Roper focussed his ire on the Warden of New College, A.H. Smith, the Vice Chancellor at the time, who he felt had badly handled the University’s management of the issue. ‘For the British Motorist, having invested large sums of money in his motor car naturally expects some return on his investment … he is therefore mortified to discover that, when thrusting his way through Oxford, he is continually held-up by traffic blocks and has to witness armies of low-class pedestrians sweeping past at 3 miles per hour.’ Trevor-Roper continued that the motorist cried: ‘away … with these obstructions, these University buildings which impede the march of petrol and progress! Let us have a huge turnpike road that ignores such obstacles!’ In the midst of these cries, so Trevor-Roper suggested, the Vice Chancellor had whispered the solution: ‘a Road through the Meadow and a Grass-Grown High Street.’[34]

  Vice Chancellor Smith’s support for the plans for an inner relief road gradually became more public, and The Times of 19 May 1955 reported a meeting of the Oxford Society (a civic organization) where he spoke in favour of plans to remove traffic from the city centre.[35] As the Vice Chancellor’s support of the scheme became more widely known, so the opposition within the University began to take shape. One of the leaders was Robert Blake, a noted historian at Christ Church, who wrote a response in The Times a few weeks later, saying that Christ Church would oppose the road ‘by every legitimate means’. The staunch opposition of Christ Church brought criticism from many in the University who were not directly affected by the schemes. Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham College, spoke for many when he remarked in a letter to a friend that ‘we must be in a position to negotiate and not rely on simply saying “no”’.[36]

  The temperature surrounding the planning debate was getting hotter, and the thermometer would be dramatically raised in September 1956 when Sandys wrote to the City Council rejecting various proposed schemes and forcing the authorities to focus on the relief of traffic in the centre of the city, making it clear that in discussion with the Minister for Transport he had agreed that the High Street should cease to be used for through traffic. The Meadow Road was, in the Minister’s opinion ‘the only feasible solution’ to Oxford’s traffic problem. The proposed road became known, for a while, as ‘Sandys Mall’.

  Oxford was full of intrigue concerning the issue as the 1950s progressed. Camps began to be formed along clear-cut lines (especially in the University, where lines were drawn between the High Street Colleges on the one side and the Meadow Colleges on the other). The social and academic networks of Oxford dons were brought to bear on the warfare surrounding the plans. Trevor-Roper’s report to Berenson described intense lobbying: ‘Of course as you can imagine, the Opposition is organizing furiously. Ministers are being lobbied in country houses, and the fact that half the House of Lords were at Christ Church is not being left unexploited by my more active colleagues.’[37] The undergraduate newspaper the Cherwell reported in October 1955 that the college community was split with fifteen opposed to the plans and ten in favour.[38] Tolkien’s views on the specifics of the plan are not known, but on the general issue of the pressure of traffic on the character of the city at this time they were clear: ‘the spirit of Isengard, if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up’ he wrote to Michael Straight in 1956, ‘the present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case’.[39]

  One of the reasons why the Meadow Road plan aroused so much discussion and debate was that, although the core problem was generally agreed upon, Sharp’s proposed solution polarized opinion both in Oxford and beyond. One senior member of Christ Church, John Lowe, was brave enough to go out on his own and publish a flysheet in the Oxford Magazine in favour of the Meadow plan. These printed sheets laid out positions ahead of debates in congregation: ‘Do you want to leave things substantially as they now are, with the High Street turned into a second Cornmarket and lorries and buses pouring in an increasing flood along Holywell and Catte Street’, his statement argued, ‘or do you wish to accept this new plan that will give us a unified University to which the peace and beauty of the past will be restored? We have been talking for years about saving the University; – if you reject this plan it will be clear that these were empty words, and that you prefer to save a Meadow.’[40]

  TRAFFIC ON THE HIGH STREET The Master of University College (situated directly on the High), Goodhart, spoke in a Congregation debate on the traffic planning issue, pitting the pressures faced by those in the colleges on the High against the more bucolic situation of Merton and Christ Church: ‘It is not usually realized that for those living along the High the greatest objection to the use of this street by the buses and heavy lorries is the continual noise and vibration…. When the traffic is removed it will be possible again to enjoy life in comparative calm in the rooms facing the high. … The road across the Meadows will have a disadvantageous effect on Christ Church and on Merton. In the case of Christ Church the road will be at the worst within 150 feet of the Meadow buildings…. [I]n the case of Merton the new road will be separated from the College by the Merton playing fields, and it will therefore be more than 500 feet away.’[41]

  The Fight Back

  From this point on a concerted campaign to oppose the plans emerged, and Robert Blake was able to get his College to make explicit their corporate opposition to the plan, as part of developing a single University position for a Public Inquiry called by the Council. They published a statement in the Oxford Mail on 29 September 1956 stating of the Meadow Road plan that: ‘It is one of the greatest acts of vandalism that could have been perpetrated. We are astounded that the Minister should have the effrontery to put forward a proposal of this nature in so arbitrary a fashion.’ Words were followed with action from the College, which issued a writ against the Minister challenging his actions to direct the City Council on procedural grounds.

  The public inquiry of 1956 resulted in one of Sharp’s ideas, that of the northern relief road through the University Parks being dropped, and the Meadow Road firmly established as the Council’s and the Minister’s preferred option: ‘the loss of quiet at the northern end of the Meadow will be greatly outweighed by the gain of peace and dignity in the heart of the University.’[42] A traffic survey reported in 1959, confirming the view that the Meadow Road was the only viable solution to Oxford’s traffic problem.

  With the Council’s position being backed by the Ministry, the turn of the decade saw the fight back against the Meadow Road become stronger, emboldened by a Public Inquiry which was conceded to by the Government in a debate in the House of Lords, with the opposition being led by Lord Beaverbrook. The University’s position had shifted considerably since the middle of the previous decade, but it still equivocated on the outright opposition to the Meadow Road plan. The plan was still on the table, but only if it could be proven that there was no viable alternative. At a hearing for the Public Inquiry at the Town Hall in December 1960, the submission from the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College summed up the mood of many in the University:

  ‘The College considers that relief should be given to the central area by the completion of the outer bypasses, the Cowley centre, new parking places, intermediate roads, and appropriate restrictions on the use of motor vehicles; and that, even if its views on the protection of the central area are rejected, no decision should be made to construct any inner relief road unless and until the need for doing so has been established beyond doubt after observing the effects of such measures.’[43]

  The intensity of the public debate on the issue ratcheted up through the decade. The pages of both national and local newspapers were full of articles in 1960, as were their letters pages. Even that beloved national institution, Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’ on BBC Radio 4, devoted time to covering the issue. Rather remarkably Cooke cited the notorious New York City developer Robert Moses (at this point his ruthless working methods were yet to be exposed in Robert Caro’s famous study of him The Power Broker) in opposition to the plan:

  ‘Don’t monkey with your parks because they seem to offer precious space for more cars. If you put divided highways in the middle of a city and trim your parks to provide for them, then all you do is attract more and more traffic to the centre of the city’.[44]

  It was at this point in the debate that Tolkien was moved to write The Bovadium Fragments. Tolkien’s perspective had been created through his own lived experience of the city. He had been an undergraduate at Exeter College in the college’s buildings on Turl Street, right in the centre of the old city, with his final year being spent in rooms in a Georgian building on St John Street. After the war, while working on the staff of the New English Dictionary (based in the glorious late seventeenth-century building of the Old Ashmolean on Broad Street) he had returned to live on St John Street; although architecturally different to his College rooms, his early Oxford experience was all spent in the centre of the city. The clogging up of these streets with traffic (with the sound and air pollution that went with it), and the proposed threat to the ancient bucolic treasure of Christ Church Meadow must have seemed deeply threatening to Tolkien.

  STUDYING IN THE DUKE HUMFREY’S LIBRARY IN THE BODLEIAN He had continued to regret the ever-growing dominance of the motor-car in Oxford. In a letter to Joan Tolkien in 1961 he remarked that ‘Oxford continues to suffer from the ravages of the machine-worshippers.’ His nostalgia brought him to remember Oxford as ‘a little old university town nestling in the country – and it had about 55,000 inhabitants. It now has nearly 100,000 more, sprawls in every direction, and is jammed with noise and smell …’.[45]

  In October 1960, having finished a draft of The Bovadium Fragments, Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin, whose family publishing house George Allen and Unwin had published his Middle-earth works since The Hobbit was first issued in 1937. Tolkien asked Unwin for the name of whoever was editing the weekly literary magazine Time and Tide, which had a wide circulation and had a broadly Christian editorial theme, and published work by fellow Inklings C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Indeed, the first review of The Lord of the Rings had appeared in the magazine, written by Lewis.[46] Whether the typescript was ever sent to the magazine is not known. (By 1968 he was referring to the work as ‘The End of Bovadium’, without any intention of publishing it.)[47]

  As Tolkien was writing up The Bovadium Fragments and still at that time contemplating publishing the work, the City Council’s proposals for the Meadow Road were coming to a critical point. The Public Inquiry eventually concluded that traffic relief would only be possible with a Meadow Road, and in 1962 the then Minister for Housing and Local Government, Dr Charles Hill, upheld its findings. A firm of London architects, Jellicoe and Coleridge, were hired to develop more detailed plans, accepting in principle the line of the road across the Meadow that the Minister had approved. Their plans had to be conscious of the public mood, their preface stating that: ‘Because it is tranquil, the meadow at present is complimentary to the city. The primary endeavour of this design has been to retain this tranquility and therefore to suppress the road and its attendant architecture.’

  The reaction in Oxford was predictably forthright: The Treasurer of Christ Church reported that the College’s view was that the outcome was ‘disastrous for the planning of Oxford’ and the Warden of Merton felt it was ‘aesthetically barbarous’.[48]

  Another Public Inquiry would soon follow, in order to settle the debate that continued to rage in both Oxford and in London. The University appointed a planning counsel to represent them in the 1965 Inquiry. A new figure appeared on the scene who would be as influential in the debate as Thomas Sharp himself. Professor Colin Buchanan (1907–2001) was a distinguished town planner specializing in transport, having worked at the Ministry of Transport in the 1930s, and served with the Royal Engineers in North Africa during the war. In 1946 he joined the newly created Ministry of Town and Country Planning. In his spare time Buchanan published Mixed Blessing: the Motor in Britain which brought him to the attention of Ernest Marples, Minister for Transport, who persuaded Buchanan to move to his Ministry.

  From his base in the Ministry, Buchanan led a team that in 1963 produced a report entitled Traffic in Towns, which introduced the idea of minimum standards for noise, pollution and other environmental factors relating to traffic in areas of high population. The report was hugely influential, and on the back of its success Buchanan left the civil service, moving to Imperial College London as their first Professor of Transport, which he held whilst also forming his own consultancy, Colin Buchanan and Partners. It was from his academic position that Buchanan was asked to produce a report as part of the University’s evidence submitted to the 1965 Public Inquiry.[49]

  The Standing Counsel for the University, Sir Edward Milner Holland, and Professor Buchanan decided that the case for the city could best be demolished by demonstrating at the Inquiry the depth of opposition. In addition to the performative aspects of this opposition Buchanan submitted a proof of over forty pages with a detailed analysis of the question of the Meadow Road, which very effectively dismantled the argument. His view was summarized:

  In my opinion, as a town planner of wide experience, the Meadow in its present form and in its entirety constitutes an asset to Oxford of the most remarkable kind. I doubt whether there is another city in the world, still less a city which is a great seat of learning, which provides almost in its centre a comparable scene of pastoral remoteness and simplicity, isolated from Motor traffic.

 

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