Mourning for Oxford: a Lamentation on Exile in Cowley

Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium; princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo. Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimae ejus in maxillis ejus: non est qui consoletur eam ex omnibus caris ejus; omnes amici ejus spreverunt eam, et facti sunt ei inimici.

The Oxford bus system is a unique and unpredictable beast: it combines in equal measure an unseasonable liberality and a shocking austerity. For it seems that, notwithstanding the perennial lateness that affects most British transport networks, whenever the three buses that share an identical route to the centre of town deign to arrive, they do so in a convoy, perhaps hoping to escape, in the strength of their great numbers, the attacks of bands of raiders or the vicissitudes of an unexpected tornado.

It is the pleasure of us who have been exiled to deep Cowley to experience, for the first time, this marvel of modern public transport: to peruse at our leisure, as the inevitable traffic that makes an apparently quick journey into a half-hour ordeal slowly trundles on, the great panoply of shop fronts that straddle Cowley road. Indeed, it seems that, from the heart of the Maghreb to the depths of Tabaristan, and from the desolate Siberian taiga to the heat of the Kalahari desert, there is not a region or nation which lacks representation among them.

Moving a little further, one passes Manzil way gardens, a somewhat dubious park known in equal measure for the hospital just beyond it and the local businessmen who, in good conservative fashion, supply for the needs of the free market a selection of substances more comprehensive than anything our beloved NHS can furnish; on the other side of the road, there operates the aromatic herbal shop, for those customers who prefer a traditional shopfront approach to their business needs.

There follow a pair of roads with names which almost comically highlight the inadequacies they were meant to disguise: Randolph Street and Union Street, bringing to mind those two great architectural accomplishments while providing in their place the greyest emanation of second-rate British suburbia. One can also glimpse Bankrupt Bar, a venue whose owners’ grasp of divination clearly never matched that of Agesilaus: for, whereas he called off his invasion of Attica for three days when the omens proved bad, they themselves provided the omen which presaged their bar’s recent collapse into insolvency.

A happy interlude follows, as the Cowley Tesco comes into view, a shop that has gone down in history as the workplace of OUCA’s favourite security guard, whom the author still has the pleasure of conversing with on those rare days when he can pull himself away from the unceasing duties the Association places upon him to make dinner for his housemates.

The joy does not last, sadly: for now appear in view the betting shops, those miserable establishments which depress, in equal measure, the mores of the locals and the appearance of the area, with their garish red fronts and terrible font choices.

There appear, too, some of the venues which I had the pleasure of calling at during my and the Treasurer’s thirteen-hour odyssey around the environs of Oxford in our journey to find a P&P venue last term: the ghastly Christadelphian Church, the boarded-up East Oxford Community Centre, and at last OUCA’s old home on James Street, the East Oxford Conservative Club.

I shall never forget venturing into that place, the salutary fuel of desperation guiding every step, and, as Odysseus to the Phaecians, presenting myself as a suppliant to their venerable chairman. He sat there, stoic, barely hearing a word I said, the weight of his years seemingly about to snap in two his long wooden cane, and shook his head to say no, as Athena in Iliad 6, recounting the manifold sins the Association had inflicted upon him. The brandy Charlie and I enjoyed in their startlingly cheap bar afterwards was among the bitterest I have tasted.

Finally, one emerges to the happy sight of the Ballroom Emporium, and with it the end of Cowley: Oxford begins. But what has one lost along the way? What fault, what crime has the hapless exile committed, that he must live so far from his College, his friends, from life in general? That the only options for entertainment within half an hour’s walk are the Cowley Retreat and the African Heat Bar; for spiritual edification, the Christian Life Centre and the Christadelphian Church; for intellectual stimulation, the boarded-up community centre or the mysteriously named ‘private shop?’

Indeed, the move to Cowley brings with it a unique feeling of alienation and a loss of a sense of direction and place. The primordial connection to the city that is at the heart of every Oxford student’s identity: the invisible chain that links him with the glories of Oxford, the thousand tiny details that make it what it is; the wonder of walking past the great libraries of the city or the Sheldonian; exploring the charming corners of the Colleges; eyeing the Bridge of Sighs as one emerges through the blackened passage from the back entrance of New… is strained and damaged.

That link, indeed, depends on a modicum of geographical closeness; not even necessarily of living in the centre; rather, of having, on a human scale, a sense of one’s own location in reference to the city. There was no such abrupt separation walking twenty minutes down St Giles’ to arrive at College last year: indeed, it is a rather lovely walk, with the sun shining bright on a beautiful Summer’s day as the noble shape of the martyrs’ memorial grows slowly more distinctive in the distance.

It makes one consider the thoughts of the College bureaucrats who thought it was a decent and acceptable thing to do to house students here, to deprive them of the allurements of living in the most wonderful city in the world, to mask with the specious phrasing of a ‘ten minute drive’ a transposition that steals part of the essence of the Oxford experience and replaces it with the dubious allurements of Cowley Road.

The ancients have left us a great cultural heritage in describing the experience of exile. Ovid, in his Tristia, pines in despair for Rome, a city both so far removed and always so close to his thoughts. He may have learnt the language of the savage locals of Tomis, may even have written poetry in their alien tongue: the despair of separation from the city he loved never left him, however.

Parue—nec inuideo—sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
     ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!
uade, sed incultus, qualem decet exulis esse;
     infelix habitum temporis huius habe.
nec te purpureo uelent uaccinia fuco—
     non est conueniens luctibus ille color—
nec titulus minio, nec cedro charta notetur,
     candida nec nigra cornua fronte geras.
felices ornent haec instrumenta libellos:
     fortunae memorem te decet esse meae.

Gibbon branded him unmanly for his anguished verse- and indeed, Gibbon himself had some experience of exile, sent away from his studies at Oxford by his Father to live with a Calvinist minister following his sudden conversion to Catholicism. Yet Gibbon had, at least, the means to return back home, and one must wonder whether his timely recanting of his new-found religious principles following the threat of being disinherited is more worthy of the rebuke than the poetry of the Roman he applied it to.

Gibbon too, had the benefit of being sent to a civilised and temperate country- more a retreat than a real punishment, where he would develop a deep love of the Helvetic form of government, customs and way of viewing the world, as well as having his first and only romantic liaison. Had he experienced the cold and bitter climes of Tomis, (or Cowley) its unfriendly and barbaric natives, the utter isolation from friends and loved ones- I venture to suggest his views on Ovid’s despair may have been somewhat more sympathetic.

Seneca’s letters from exile are instructive here, too: they draw up a philosophical framework which the unfortunate banished can use to temper the vicissitudes of his fate. The noble death of Cato, who taunted fortune’s feeble attempts to resist him; the glorious actions of Rutullus, who refused to return from exile when Sulla, in the full swing of his tyranny, summoned him back, are salutary examples of strength and persistence in the face of unbearable odds… for there are two things that an exile can never lose, his individual virtue and the universal human nature allotted him.

As one ponders the near-unbearable weight of separation from the world’s most beautiful city, it is, at last, instructive to look to the future. For myself, there is hope of revival next year, as the glories of central Oxford beckon back: I would venture to hope also for Cowley, and the thousands of examples of grim suburbia like it. Perhaps if the iron cordon of LTNs that suffocates Cowley Road could be relaxed- the parks cleaned up, the businesses revived, the bus networks made effective and rational- there could be hope for the place of my exile yet.

For now, not daring to hope for such radical things, I content myself with submitting this reflection to you.

Franek Bednarski (The President) is a third year undergraduate reading Litterae Humaniores at Jesus College.

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