Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306130013
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: OXFORD, ENGLAND LENGTH: Long
It rises from a smooth plain, an hour outside of London, and bristles with more than 600 buildings protected as national treasures. At sunset, they hurl epic shadows down on the undergraduates along High Street. By day, while church bells toll, ancient gates scrape and beloved fountains burble, they endure the rusty leanings of 30,000 bicycles. And when exams draw near at the 36 colleges that make up Oxford University and dominate the city, I can imagine these old walls summoning genuine horror.
Fall behind in metaphysical poetry, and the 14th-century spire of St. Mary the Virgin will pierce your dreams. Overlook a subtlety of molecular biology and the bells of the 17th-century Tom Tower at Christ Church College will toll for thee. Nearly a millennium of architectural ideas is wedged into the single square mile that holds the city's core and most of the university. It's a wonder anyone graduates.
But if Oxford were just a matter of architecture, the place wouldn't draw, daunt and seduce strangers the way it does. Oxford has tenure. Behind it stretches the longest lineage of college scholarship in the English-speaking world, spanning more than eight centuries. Row in its waters and you risk drowning by tradition and anecdote.
Here studied W.H. Auden, Benazir Bhutto, Sir Richard Burton, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Indira Gandhi, J. Paul Getty, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, T.E. Lawrence, John Locke, Dudley Moore, Rupert Murdoch, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Ruskin, Leopold Stokowski, Margaret Thatcher, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Wesley, Oscar Wilde and Christopher Wren, among others.
Here an institution founded in 1379 still carries the nickname of New College.
Here, from the observation level of St. Mary the Virgin, a visitor may spy half a dozen languorous students in a cloistered quadrangle, not tanning, not reading, not guitar-playing, but adjusting wickets for croquet.
Sit above the brass section and listen as the City of Oxford Orchestra sends Schubert resounding through the 323-year-old Sheldonian Theater on High Street. The music is good, and the setting is better - a domed, airy, acoustically intimate room that was the first building designed by famed architect Christopher Wren.
Walking on High Street near the university's Examination Schools, encounter an ashen-faced young man as he steps from a 19th-century doorway. His mandatory formal wear (subfusc in the local language) is bunched and rumpled from neck to knees. He is a law student, and he has just performed dreadfully on the final paper of the term.
But he is an Englishman at Oxford. He neither complains nor explains, but fires up a cigarette and shuffles away, abject, unkempt, and yet somehow noble.
Offering such spectacles, Oxford does not go unappreciated. The city's annual visitors now outnumber residents 1.5 million to 100,000. The storefronts include shops like The Oxford Story, which does nothing but trade on the place's past. Dueling double-decker bus tour companies do battle in streets where once horse-drawn carriages commanded right of way. (Both charge five pounds, but the the green-and-cream Guide Friday bus uses live guides instead of tapes.)
Some visitors browse Blackwell's, an enterprise that began in 1879 as a 12-foot-square room on Broad Street and has grown to claim nine sites around town and a reputation as England's premier bookseller.
Others appraise the considerable collection of art and artifacts in the Ashmolean Museum, England's first public museum, founded in 1683. (Also on exhibit last summer was a fine example of circuitous English logic: "Two pounds from each visitor would keep the museum open and free," suggested a sign at the entrance. Open, perhaps, but not free.)
Still other visitors line up for views from on high, seeking out St. Mary the Virgin, Carfax Tower or the Church of St. Michael-at-the-North-Gate.
In July and August, when the place is empty of undergraduates, the tourist population peaks, and hundreds of Americans and others take up residence in college facilities to study, with widely varying intensities, in myriad summertime programs.
But in other months, the visitor shares hallowed halls with the robed dons, bowler-hatted campus police and the 14,000 students who link Oxford past to Oxford present. And while the buildings do cast a spell, it's the students who keep the place alive.
Several years ago, on my first visit to Oxford, I was assigned to interview an American graduate student there. Her name was Bonnie St. John, and she was an international relations graduate of Harvard. She was also a champion skier despite the amputation of one leg above the knee, and an African-American. Since she was a Rhodes Scholar, her fees were being paid from the fortune left by the most famous of Africa's white colonizers, Oxford alumnus Cecil Rhodes.
"Sometimes," she said, "I stop in awe and just think, `Where am I?' I live in this town with these storybook buildings, and I walk down the streets with the wind howling and see gargoyles and stained glass. It's incredible."
Then she showed me the ancient oath she swore to get reading rights at the 390-year-old Bodleian Library, led me past the dangling dead rabbits of the covered market downtown, and slipped an alcoholic gratuity to the porter at the gate of her 440-year-old campus. Nobody's 12th century plans for this university had included her, but here she was, making the place her own.
Sooner or later, you will have to leave.
Before you do, take another swing through town. Walk High Street on Friday evening and watch the Oddbins wine shop sprout a queue of bottle-bearing customers in college ties. While they wait, tardy undergraduates flee past on their bicycles, formal robes inflated by the breeze. When the pubs close at 11, the students will appear again, shirts limp, gowns askew.
Or stake out the Sheldonian Theater. If the month is June, a graduation ceremony may spill graduates and beaming families into the stone-walled courtyard. A young woman will adjust her mortarboard while a young man throws an arm around his father for a photograph.
Or wander south along the Cherwell. On the water, two young women balance their flat-bottomed punt, slug down Budweisers, draw slowly on their cigarettes, and ease past the cricket players. In the meadow beyond Merton College, two shirtless young men in boxing gloves spar lightly. If this scene were on a screen, the "Chariots of Fire" theme would now swell. Instead, the sounds are birdcalls, distant shouts, slowly moving water, and the faint echoes from that humbling skyline.
by CNB