Patrick Comerford
Headington is a suburb in east Oxford, at the top of Headington Hill overlooking the city in the Thames valley below, with Marston to the north-west, Cowley to the south, and Barton and Risinghurst to the east. When I first visited Oxford in my teens, around 1969 or 1970, I stayed in Headington at the youth hostel in Cowley House on Jack Straw’s Lane, which closed in 2001.
I have been through Headington many times in recent years, on my way to and from the hospitals. But an appointment earlier this week at John Radcliffe Hospital and a follow-up visitlater in the week, offered opportunities and time to walk around Headington, and to see the ‘Headington Shark’, the area’s most celebrated landmark and an anti-war protest. There was time too to see Saint Andrew’s Church, Holy Trinity Church and some other churches in the area; to see the ‘Black Booy’ – a pub with a controversial name; and to look into some of Headington’s literary, academic and cultural connections, including links with CS Lewis and Isaiah Berlin.
The commercial and shopping life of Headington and traffic through the area focuses on London Road, the main road between London and Oxford. But Headington also has not one but two High Streets, New High Street and Old High Street. And it was on one of those streets that I found the ‘Headington Shark’ and other noticeable sites.
The Headington Shark – properly named ‘Untitled 1986’ – is a sculpture of a large shark embedded head-first in the roof of a terraced house at 2 New High Street. It began as protest art, installed 40 years ago by Bill Heine and John Buckley, without planning permission and as an anti-war protest, symbolising bombs crashing into homes and buildings.
The shark was installed on 9 August 1986 on the roof of the home of Bill Heine, an American-born radio presenter. Heine and Buckley came up with the idea of the shark while they were drinking wine on the street, and imagined the shark as a metaphor for bombs falling from the US warplanes that flew overhead on their way to bomb Libya.
The shark is in deliberate contrast with its ordinary suburban location. It was designed, created and installed by the Leeds-born sculptor John Buckley with his friend Anton Castiau, a local carpenter. ‘The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation’, Heine said. ‘It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki’.
The painted fibreglass sculpture weighs 200 kg (450 lb), is 7.6 metre (25 ft) long, and the title ‘Untitled 1986’ is written on the gate. It took three months to build the installation, and it was put in place on the 41st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
Over time, there were complaints about the conditions of the sculpture and the house, so to mark the shark’s 21st anniversary it was renovated by Buckley in 2007. Magnus Hanson-Heine, bought the house in 2016 to preserve the shark, before his father Bill Heine died on 2 April 2019. The house has been an Airbnb guesthouse since 2018.
The shark was controversial and was the subject of a six-year battle between Oxford City Council and Bill Heine. The council tried to remove the shark on the grounds of safety and because it did not have proper planning permission. However, the shark had much local support. The Department of the Environment ruled on planning grounds in 1992 that the shark could remain in place because it did not harm a visual amenity.
Oxford City Council had the shark listed with Historic England in 2016 and designated the sculpture a heritage site in 2022, despite objection from Magnus Hanson-Heine, who said, ‘Using the planning apparatus to preserve a historical symbol of planning law defiance is absurd.’
People have lived in Headington ever since the Stone Age, and excavations in Barton Lane suggest a date in the 11th century BCE, while pottery found on the Manor Ground is evidence of an Iron Age settlement in the 7th century BCE. The site of a Roman villa and Roman kilns from about 300 CE have been found, and Anglo-Saxon burial remains from about 500 CE have been discovered.
The name Headington comes from the Old English Hedena’s dun, meaning ‘Hedena’s hill’, and it was the site of a palace or hunting lodge of the Kings of Mercia. Æthelred the Unready, in a charter in 1004, gave land in Headington to Saint Frideswide’s Priory, including the quarry and the area around it.
Henry I granted a chapel at Headington to the Augustinians of Saint Frideswide’s Priory when the priory was founded in 1122. Saint Andrew’s Church, the oldest surviving building in Headington, was built in the mid-12th century, enlarged in the 13th century, the bell tower dates from the 13th or 14th century and the Gothic Revival architect JC Buckler restored the church and lengthened the nave in 1862-1864.
Stone from Headington Quarry was used to build Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1474, and was later used to build Cardinal College, later Christ Church.
Headington Football Club, later Headington United, was formed in 1893 and eventually became Oxford United.
Headington developed rapidly in the early 20th century, with new housing around the mediaeval village, now known as Old Headington, around Saint Andrew’s Church. New Headington, south side of London Road, dates from the late 19th century, and other neighbourhoods include Highfield, Quarry and Headington Hill.
Today the main employment sectors are medicine, education and research. The area includes the main campus of Oxford Brookes University, Ruskin College, which moved to Headington in 2012, and Oxford’s main hospitals, including the John Radcliffe, Nuffield and Churchill.
Headington’s notable residents have included the poet Elizabeth Jennings; CS Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, who lived in the area until he died in 1963 and who is buried at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry; JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, who lived in Headington from 1953 to 1968; the author Elizabeth Bowen; the newspaper publisher Robert Maxwell; and Lord Nuffield (William Morris).
Oxford academics who have lived in Headington include Sir Anthony Kenny, who died earlier last month (3 August 2026), and Sir Isaiah Berlin, who married Mrs Aline Halban of Headington House in 1956, and lived there until he died in 1997. The comedian David Mitchell, star of the BBC series Ludwig, grew up in Headington.
Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo (1886-1978), a Spanish writer, diplomat, writer, historian and pacifist and Professor of Spanish at Oxford University, lived in Headington before and after the Spanish Civil War, in 1929-1931 and 1940-1973. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize, received the Charlemagne Prize in 1973.
The original, 17th century Black Boy stood from 1667 or earlier at the corner of Barton Lane and Old High Street. The board above the door showed a black boy-servant, a sign commonly hung outside coffee houses in the 17th century. The pub was rebuilt on the site as the present Black Boy on Old High Street in 1937.
The rebuilt pub used to have a sculpted figure of a black servant in the niche above the entrance, but this was smashed in 1990 and was replaced by the painting of a chimney-sweep’s boy, which was supposedly more politically correct. Even so, in 1997 there was an unsuccessful attempt by Oxford students to get the pub’s name changed on the grounds that it was offensive.
The niche remained empty from about 2008, but now a black horse decorates the façade as a new story is told about the pub taking its name from a racehorse. Watching school children walk by in the afternoon September sunshine, I wondered what any black child in Headington would think of the name of the pub, no matter what explanation or excuse is offered.
I have yet to be convinced by those explanations or excuses. Instead, I visited the White Hart at 12 St Andrew’s Road, across the street from Saint Andrew’s Church. The White Hart dates from the late 17th century, and is believed to have been the inn once known as ‘Joan of Headington’s’. It is a listed building, and retains some of its original panelling and doors.
In the 17th century, Headington was a favourite destination of Oxford academics taking a walk into the country. As the present main road through the centre did not exist at the time, after reaching the top of Headington Hill they would continue along Cuckoo Lane to the alehouse where the Joan of Headington apparently offered more than ale. By 1750, the inn had become more respectable and it was given a new name as the White Hart.
The White Hart was the annual meet for the South Oxfordshire Hounds, and was also a centre for the mummers. A 26 ft-deep well was discovered in the courtyard in 1976, but was covered for safety reasons.
As for the former youth hostel, which I stayed in when I was 17 or 18, it was renamed Dorothea Beale House after one of the founders of St Hilda’s College, its address is now 32B Jack Straw’s Lane, and it is a children’s nursery.
But more about Saint Andrew’s Church and some other churches in Headington, Jack Straw’s Lane and the connections with CS Lewis in the days to come, hopefully.
