Patrick Comerford
When villages lose their parish church and post office, when a town loses more of its local pubs, and when a city loses its bookshops, they lose something of their character, when a cathedral city and a university city loses its best second-hand bookshops it loses part of its soul.
Oxford University Press closed its bookshop on Broad Street initially with the Covid lockdown in March 2020 and then decided shut up shop in 2022. Its academic books are now stocked at Blackwell’s in Broad Street, with a dedicated display space for OUP books in the Norrington Room.
Dillons bookshop was based at William Baker House from 1987 until Waterstones took over the five-storey building on the corner of Broad Street and Cornmarket in 1998. But those premises closed recently and Waterstones have moved to Queen’s Street.
Blackwell’s apart, my favourite bookshop in Oxford is the Oxfam bookshop on the corner of St Giles and Pusey Street, close to Pusey House, St Cross College, Blackfriars and Regent’s Park College. It is in the heart of Oxford, across the street from Saint John’s College and the Lamb and Flag, close to the Ashmolean and a short five-minute from the bus station at Gloucester Green.
I went there earlier this week to browse through its shelves, and I was correct in knowing instinctively that it was there I could find a copy of a book I have bought, lent and lost many times, Stephen Verney’s Water into Wine.
When John Mortimer opened the Oxfam shop there in 1987, it was the first of Oxfam’s 76 specialist charity bookshops. Oxfam pays full rent for the shop to Regent’s Park College, but all the stock is donated, and it is run by 75 volunteers and one paid manager.
The shop at St Giles is one of two Oxfam bookshops in Oxford, with another one at Turl Street. There is another Oxfam shop in the city centre at Broad Street, and there are Oxfam shops on Cowley Road in East Oxford and in Summertown.
But now a cloud hangs over the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles and there are concerns about its future. Oxford City Council has turned down an application by Regent’s Park College to convert the shop into its Middle Common Room (MCR), citing local regulations limiting city centre ground floor units to specific uses such as retail, culture, tourism and entertainment.
Oxfam says that at the moment it has no immediate plans to move, while Regent’s Park College is now reviewing its options in light of the council decision. The college says the proposed change of use of the building was intended ‘to provide a larger, fit-for-purpose MCR and dedicated postgraduate study space to meet the needs of its expanded postgraduate body’.
No 56 Saint Giles is the Oxfam bookshop, and the building is divided between the bookshop, which has been on the ground floor and in the basement since 1987, and student accommodation on the upstairs floors.
Regent’s Park College applied for a change-of-use, claiming the building is not in the city centre as officially defined and that college activities would not ‘lead to detrimental effects’ such as artificial lighting and construction, or ‘impact upon the significance of the heritage asset’.
In rejecting the application, Oxford City Council does not dispute that it is unlikely that ‘any harm would arise from the change of use itself’. But it notes too that the site is, in fact, part of the city centre area by the standards of the Oxford Local Plan 2036.
In their objections, members of the public said the change of use would have an ‘effect on character of area’ and the loss of a community asset. Many objectors expressed fears of ‘noise and disturbance’ and difficulties with access.
No 56 is a large corner building facing onto St Giles and Pusey Street. It was built ca 1800, and is a Grade II listed building. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, George Bridges lived there and ran a grocer’s shop. It was then sold on to families named Nalder, Louch, Cook and Chandler, and the WH Chandler ran both a grocer’s shop and a private hotel upstairs. For almost 20 years, from 1958 to 1976, it was a Wimpy Bar.
Regent’s Park College traces its story back to a time when ‘Dissenters’ or ‘Nonconformists’, including Baptists, could not take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. A Baptist Education Society was formed in 1752, and another in 1804, to provide education for Baptist ministers. They led to formation of Stepney Academy in the East End of London in 1810; by the mid-19th century, the college was part of London University, in 1856 the college moved into property in Regent’s Park and became Regent’s Park College.
After World War I, the college began looking for a new home outside London, and it almost moved to Cambridge in 1922. But those plans fell through, and five years later the current site in Oxford was bought, along houses, gardens, cottages and garages. The college was given the status of a Permanent Private Hall (PPH) in 1957. Training Baptist ministers remains a central part of its life.
The present MCR at Regent’s Park College was established in 2005, when the college had a graduate community of only 30 members. It is underground in a former storage basement with no windows, and there has been a five-fold expansion in the graduate student body over the past two decades, so that the college believes the current MCR is ‘wholly unsuitable’.
The rejection of the application comes after Jesus College successfully converted the former Burger King on Cornmarket Street into student accommodation last year (2025). Other colleges with plans for new developments include Magdalen College, which plans to demolish a 1960s building to provide more student housing.
Next door to the Oxfam bookshop, No 55 St Giles probably dates from the late 18th century. It is Grade II listed and in recent years it has been the Principal’s Lodgings of Regent’s Park College. No 55 has been part of Regent’s Park College since 1928, and the college principal, Henry Wheeler Robinson, was living there in 1939.
The heraldic arms of the college over the doorway include a red cross, an open Bible with pages inscribed with the words ‘Dominus Jesus’, a fish representing the Ichthus symbol, and the motto, Omnia Probate Quod Bonum Tenete, ‘Test everything; hold fast to what is good’ (I Thessalonians 5: 21).
Regent’s Park College is also turning the Grade II*-listed fellow’s house at 53-54 St Giles into offices. This was built as a single house, probably in the 16th century, but was subdivided into two houses from 1772 to 1866. The passageway to the north of the right-hand house runs down into what used to be Drewett’s Yard, S ix terraced cottages there were demolished in 1939 when Regent’s Park College was built on Pusey Street.
The Revd Leonard Herbert Brockington (1906-1978), Senior Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac in the University of Oxford and a tutor in Regent’s Park College, lived at the house in 1939. Regent’s Park College bought Nos 53-54 St Giles in 1956 and the Revd W Morris, the college bursar and senior tutor lived there. Regent’s Park College applied to alter No 53-54 in 2024, and applied last year (2025) to change its use from college accommodation to offices.
Further north along St Giles, the Eagle and Child at No 49 is still covered in cladding, fencing and scaffolding as work on its refurbishment continues slowly, and the latest reports say it is not expected to reopen before 2027.
Much of St Giles is already made up of institutional buildings, and the street probably needs more variety, including like shops, cafés and pubs. On the opposite side of the street, the Lamb and Flag, close to Saint John’s, Oxford’s wealthiest college, has been saved from threatened closure by vocal local activists.
Oxford is short of good places to buy good second-hand books, apart from Blackwell’s. The Oxfam shop on St Giles has been described in the Spectator as ‘a bastion of high-quality stock and knowledgeable staff who charge fair prices for the kind of tomes that you simply cannot find elsewhere in the city,’ where volunteers happily offer informed recommendations inspired by their own extensive reading.
It is ironic that this sad sequence of events is unfolding in the city that gave Oxfam its name. Oxfam was founded in 1942, when it began as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, to alleviate hunger during World War II. Today, Oxfam operates in 79 countries and there are 21 members in the Oxfam Confederation in Australia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and Latin America and the Caribbean.
The closure of the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles would be another sad loss for booklovers in the City of Dreaming Spires.
