City with attitude

What to see in Oxford
About seven million people visit Oxford each year to see the beautiful buildings in the centre of town. The oldest is over 1,000 years old (the Saxon tower of St Michael at the North Gate).

Countless millions of photos get taken of the university buildings, dating from the 12th century, that are in all the guidebooks. This is one of them, the Radcliffe Camera built in 1737 and part of the University Library.

Most visitors have no idea that there’s another side to Oxford: a car factory out by the ring road; a wooded valley running between houses where you can go fossil-hunting in the stream and mushrooming on its banks; a street lined with restaurants from all nations - Italian, Russian, Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Polish, Syrian and even from an unrecognised nation: Kurdistan. (No Chinatown for Oxford; we have a Worldtown.)

But it’s not so much a place that I’m pleased to show visitors, it’s an attitude. Most people have heard of Oxfam, now an international charity campaigning against poverty. ‘Oxfam’ is short for the ‘Oxford Committee for Famine Relief’, a group of people who in 1942 campaigned for food to be sent through an allied naval blockade to starving people in enemy-occupied Greece.

Oxford is full of people who care how the world is and who want to make it a better place.

Almost two years ago, within days of the picture of the drowned refugee child, Alan Kurdi, catching international media attention, 1,000 people came out on the street here calling (successfully) for the City Council to offer homes to refugees. Local refugee charities were inundated with people wanting to help.

This evening Oxford people were out in Solidarity With Charlottesville. And stayed out even when the rain came.