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THAMES: 16) Nightmares of the Spires

A crossing for oxen, they called it. Good enough, right? Who doesn’t like oxen? They go nuuo. Watch them mooch across the river. Touch them, if you really want. Build your civilisation around all the stuff they do for you. Was that not enough?
 
Apparently not, because then they just had to go and do this.
 
“I have an idea, let’s pack our settlement with as many limestone phalluses sticky-up bits as we possibly can. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
So they did, and now everyone thinks they’re special.
So rose the dreaming spires, as they were so irritatingly immortalised in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, and in their image the oxen-ford – one of so many – became the den of one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of all humankind. To this day the crackling magnetism of its erudite pinnacles strikes awe into throngs of aspiring participants and visitors from all the inhabited corners of this world...
 
...for most of whom its name, with its scholarly romance, is all but synonymous with that of the settlement which hosts it.
 
Here, then, is Oxford: principal city – only city – of the upper Thames, and capital both of its wealthy shire and of the English literary imagination.
 
Has anyone actually counted the spikes in this place? Is it possible within one lifetime?
But we aren’t here for the romance. This critical expedition up the Thames (‘or Isis’, as they call it here) has proceeded upon the principle that the more highly a place’s power pierces the sky, the heavier the anvil of scrutiny onto which its ear must be brought down. And here, at the very peak of the procession of the Privilege Forts of the middle Thames, we confront – just look at it – the most practised and proficient sky-shredders of all.
 
What is Oxford, really? Is there not, beneath the glamour and fancy masonry, a Thames town like any other? An Oxford of wars and riots, of massacres and plagues, of industrial hope and ruination, of brutal exclusion and injustice? The people of this city would be the first to tell you that the university is not all that Oxford is, and has in fact been an almighty pain in the arse for its mere mortal populace at times. And as for that university, for all its polished dialects and lengthy bibliographies, should we not expect that it is but one more creation of the English, with all the dreadful tendencies they have displayed when they get their hands on power?
 
As the palaces and castles on the way up here have well demonstrated, you don’t typically make it this big in this country without perpetrating some awful level of colonial, gendered and/or class-based violence. Do the spires stand shameless in that pattern? Or dare they claim exemption from it?
The river downstream near Abingdon. A world away from the spires, yet ever in their shadow.
With its enormous weight in books, films and other popular media, Oxford projects the expectation of its atmosphere of enchantment across its surrounding countryside. But the length of river that links it to Abingdon, though never far on the map from the grand city or its satellites, feels like the remotest reach so far on this journey. Perhaps its magic has deteriorated along with its country? Or was it always more illusion than reality? Either way it is time to traverse it, and so complete the middle Thames passage.
 
Upstream from Abingdon Bridge, the start of today’s section, on a fog-filled late summer’s morning. At right is the Nag’s Head pub on its namesake river island.

Start: Abingdon Bridge (nearest station: miles away, take the bus to Stratton Way from Oxford or Didcot Parkway instead)
End: Osney Bridge (nearest station: Oxford)
Length: 15.2km/9.5 miles
Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire, Vale of White Horse, City of Oxford
 
Topics: Abingdon outskirts, Nuneham Courtenay (with Lewis Carroll, and the forced removal of an entire village), Radley (with Radley College), Sandford-on-Thames (with the ‘Sandford Lasher’), Oxford suburbs, Oxford – City and University
 
 
 
Abingdon outskirts
The lay of Abingdon’s surroundings was shaped long ago by its monastery. Across the two-part Abingdon Bridge the island of Andersey, now the town’s recreational green space, was formed by the ‘Swift Ditch’ which the monks cut through this corner a millennium ago.

On the north side are the Abbey Meadows: once the grounds of Abingdon Abbey, now a public park and play area with outdoor pool. The southern Andersey banks are more open, less done-up, and a fun place for dogs to run around.
Then the bush packs in, a preliminary taste of green density to come.
A few thoughtfully-positioned spiderwebs have revived this withered bush as a natural art installation.
And here’s the food court, doing hearty custom this morning.

Just upstream of the town sits Abingdon Lock. At first glance a 1790 Thames Navigation Commission job like many of the others, this lock is in fact a creature of the long hydropolitical story of this bend. For most of the preceding centuries the Abbey’s ‘Swift Ditch’ had functioned as the main channel for river traffic. But with the coming of industrial times, Abingdon’s mercantile interests, likely eyeing the imminent arrival of the Wilts and Berks Canal, managed to revert the main route to this natural channel and got this lock constructed as part of that process.
 
Abingdon Lock.
The weir is thought to descend from one the monks built in the tenth century. Walkers can cross it to the north bank, as the south has impassably steep woods ahead.
A more exotic breed of cattle than those more regularly encountered on these stretches.
The north bank now provides an escape from Abingdon through the Barton Fields. This former infrastructural land has been converted to a rich little nature reserve, designated in 2003 and managed by local volunteers to promote biodiversity.
 
The thick growths push roamers off the river for a while, but you are still in regular company of its inlets and ditches. The Abbey used to leverage these local waterways as fisheries and an energy source for its mills.
Barton Fields has been arranged to shelter a range of habitat types. Abingdon’s railway station used to stand on this side of the town, connected via a branch line through here to Radley upriver. Most of the track was pulled up after its closure in the 1980s during Abingdon’s industrial decline.
This being a nature reserve, it’s worth keeping an eye out for early morning friends.
 
Today was one of the last blasts of summer, with the cooling nights coating the plant life in dew.
These would appear to be Raging Red Furyberries, which derive their colouration from how each berry has political opinions in radical conflict with the berries next to it. Lacking the armaments or locomotion to smash each other up, they can only seethe in crimson frustration.
The upper entrance to the ‘Swift Ditch’ marks the effective limit of Abingdon’s control of the river, and the entry in earnest to Oxford’s inner envelope.
 
Provoked past its patience by the manifold misdeeds of this society, the grass here seems to have risen up and devoured whole the users of this picnic site. No-one has dared go near it since.
And here’s one of the two adjacent entries to the ‘Swift Ditch’. The land at right (with boat) is the northeastern corner of Andersey island. Imagine how many monks must have trudged out here, robes rolled up and toting picks and shovels, to dig out this channel one thousand years ago.
Out of sight beyond the northern fields are more gravel pits, abandoned decades ago and since flooded to form the Radley Lakes. Originally numbering over a dozen and spreading all the way up the banks ahead, about half were obliterated when the electrical authorities and corporations began dumping waste ash from Didcot Power Station into them. This provoked a frantic community campaign, which in the 2000s managed to stop the destruction and preserve what was left of the lakes as a recreational space and wildlife reserve.
Is the water magic because of Oxford? Does drinking it make you more knowledgeable? Want to try it? (Hint: don’t try it.)
This then is the Oxford Green Belt: a doughnut of land, some five miles in radius, where since 1975 planning and development have been heavily constrained by the local authorities to limit Oxford’s urban sprawl.
 
In an English context Green Belts became an established notion in the twentieth century, championed especially by Labour Party administrations against the harms of rampant urbanisation and now in place around some dozen towns and cities. They are resented by the priests of the free market, whose go-to argument seems to be that Green Belts reduce space for building houses, thus pushing up house prices and contributing to the English housing crisis (a far from theoretical problem in this particular region). In fact Green Belts are a red (or perhaps green) herring on this matter. The housing crisis has less to do with land scarcity and more to do with the English class system – specifically, the policy-driven disappearance of affordable social housing, and a housing sector configured not for those who need somewhere to live but rather for bankers, housing speculators and rampant landlordism.
 
White and purple daisies like these are in abundance up this riverbank. They’re not to blame for this country’s homelessness disaster.
To the south, the bush has started to gobble up this forgotten agricultural concern.
More earthworks to the south. A tradition stretching back thousands of years in this region was added to by these more recent works to build the Culham off-road motorcycle (‘motocross’) racetrack. This prestigious course in the motocross world is currently a battleground in the Green Belt war; property developers are hungering to overwhelm it with an estate of over 3,000 new (and no doubt unaffordable) houses that would be several times larger than most of the surrounding villages.
Here the Nuneham Railway Bridge – colloquially the Black Bridge – brings the Great Western Railway’s Oxford branch back across the river, with which it now runs in parallel the rest of the way to Oxford.
 
The original Nuneham Bridge was an 1844 timber Brunel design, but was replaced in iron the following decade. The present steel bridge replaced that in turn in 1929.
As if to show arrivals that they are not to be messed with, the Oxford sorcerers have captured some superhero and imprisoned his soul in the brickwork beneath the bridge.
 
 
Nuneham Courtenay
The bridge gets its name from a village which ought to be just ahead on the east bank. Nuneham derives from New Ham, simply “new farmstead/settlement, and its riverbanks offer the prettiest hints so far of the postulated Oxford enchantment.
 
The thick tree cover of Lock Wood packs the south bank slope here.
Evidence of a methodical approach. Much of this land isn’t so much left green as kept green.
There we go – a tunnel to another world. Watch out for suspicious rabbits.
Of all the stories soaked in these woods and reeds, none is so redolent as the excursions of Oxford mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) – better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Weaving together extraordinary otherworlds and logical puzzles and paradoxes with a comically absurd cast of characters (anthropomorphic animals, political caricatures, megalomaniacal playing cards and chess pieces all included) along with some quite renowned body-altering food, the Alicestories have been among the most phenomenally influential works in all of English literature. Accessibly presented yet deeply profound, their tropes so trouble the margins between reality and imagination that they have not only seeded their way into cultural consciousnesses worldwide (Alice is enormous in Japan for instance) but also spawned an entire field of study whose devotees, known as Carrollians, have dedicated breathtaking time and ink to unpacking the mysteries of these texts and their oftentimes bewildering author.
 
 
What is not in doubt is how fundamentally the Oxford Thames (‘or Isis’, they’ll remind us) provided the seedbed for what Carroll nurtured forth. The people, buildings and ways of life that surrounded him at Oxford University’s Christ Church College inspired many of the characters, structures and motifs of these tales, whose main content he appears to have come up with spontaneously during boat trips with friends up or down the river.
 
Famously friends for Carroll often meant little girls, whose company he preferred and with whom his fascination regularly comes through in his writing. Such a character would likely not have survived the baying mobs of today, who are inclined to scream pedophile at non-conforming individuals, harmless artistic subcultures, or otherised groups with marginalised sexualities or darker skin pigmentations, but have little to say or rather, blame the victims – when actualsexual abuse is committed, within their structurally abusive society, by established power such as celebrities, rich businessmen, priests, sports coaches, police officers, mainstream authoritarian parents, or certain members of the royal family.
 
In fact no evidence has been found of any erotic dimension to Carroll’s much-studied interest in young girls. His sexuality is rather one of his many eccentric mysteries which, along with those of his mental health and attitude to religion, invite perhaps more pertinent questions into how far his Oxford privilege made a life of such idiosyncrasy supportable at a time when the judgemental and punitive Victorian norms of his country certainly abusive to children in the extreme wrecked so many misfits who lacked his class protection.
 
The main inspiration for Aliceis thought to have been one of the girls in question: Alice Liddell, also of an Oxford University family. It was to her and her sisters during one such boat trip up to Godstow that Carroll came up with the earliest version of what, on them enjoying his telling and asking him to write it down, eventually grew into the manuscript for Wonderland. Frequently his rowing parties also came down here to Nuneham, whose setting is thought to have heavily influenced its Looking-Glasssequel.
 
Lock Wood Island, here at right, is coated in trees but used to have a lock, bridge, and thatched-roof cottage. As a popular picnic spot in the nineteenth century it was a favourite for Lewis Carroll’s boat trips, with its heavily wooded surroundings suggestive of those that stretch through much of Through the Looking-Glass.
Alone in a riverside clearing – but not looking particularly put out by its solitude – is what appears to have been Radley College’s old boathouse, now re-done into some unaffordable private mansion.
So far so enchanted then? Let’s ruin that.
 
The question all this raises is where this village of Nuneham, which is supposed to be right there on the east riverbank, actually went. Like Sutton Courtenay downstream it got the name of the de Courtenay family of Norman nobility attached to it. In this case it happened later, around the fourteenth century, as part of a merry-go-round of titled big-named families who got hold of the manor when their predecessors died without heirs or fell from political favour.
 
This revolving door spun on till Nuneham fell into the hands of the Harcourt family (another Norman hangover, now extinct). More specifically it was bought by their first earl, the diplomat Simon Harcourt, and at his will something extremely English happened.
 
Where Nuneham village once stood, there is now this opulent Palladian villa in 470 hectares of landscaped pleasure-gardens.
Simon Harcourt decided that he wanted a residence in Nuneham with lavish gardens, a sweeping view of the river, and all other such luxuries as befitted his noble caste. The only problem of course was Nuneham itself. The village, and the people living in it, were in the way. And so he had it demolished – manor house, cottages, church, the lot – and rebuilt a mile and a half to the east to make way for Nuneham House, his new riverside villa, with a vast park that would later receive the attentions of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, England’s landscape-artist-in-chief.
 
As for the impact on the people who lived there, let alone the question of their consent – well, these of course are not recorded. This was a period in which the broader Enclosure movement to which this act belonged was laying waste to the rural communities of England, who for the whim and profit of rich landowners, were thrown off their traditional land into poverty, starvation, and a growing regime of laws, courts and sadistically violent punishments to stop them ever getting it back. Quite typically, since the winners of this process were the ones who wrote the history, all readily available information today on what happened here seems to be about how spectacular Citizen Harcourt’s amazing new villa was, with not one word on the feelings or fates of the villagers it displaced.
 
One of the most cutting contemporary critics of this decimation of the English peasantry – its customs, folklore and knowledge as well as its livelihoods and bodies – was the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith. His long poem The Deserted Village (1770) lamented the death of a hamlet named ‘Auburn’: its buildings dilapidated, its fields seized for the villas and parks of the ‘man of wealth and pride’, its inhabitants lost to the cruelties and corruptions of the cities or to overseas emigration. ‘Auburn’ is fictional, but Goldsmith is known to have personally witnessed and condemned the destruction of


This post first appeared on Chaobang's Travels, please read the originial post: here

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THAMES: 16) Nightmares of the Spires

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