Reflections

I spent today in a beautiful, old, white-painted stone room, with broad Gothic windows almost down to the floor and a shallow wooden ceiling with decorated bosses: the Clore Old Library.
 
In the 1100s students from across Europe started coming to Oxford. They lived and learnt in monastic halls or, later, colleges but the university had no buildings of its own. In 1320 it adopted St Mary’s church as its administrative centre and built a two-storey building east of the tower whose upper room became the library with large, heavy books chained to desks. This is where we were (minus the books which were moved into a bigger, shinier library across the square built by Thomas Bodley in 1450).
 
The room has been used for meetings for a long time – the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (later Oxfam) held its first meeting here in 1942 – and many eminent people have spoken here.
 
And today eight of us took a step back to talk about how we could do our work with refugees better. We are not eminent, we will not be remembered and we did not add our names to those gouged, with eighteenth century dates, into the heavy oak table at the back of the room. Perhaps, though, such surroundings will help us remember, and implement, some of our reflections and the improvements we discussed.


This is the Radcliffe Camera through one window, reflected in another.