Oxford Audio Tour: Behind the Gown

This is a compact corner pub with pale stucco walls, a simple pitched roof, and a projecting hanging sign marking the old timber-framed building at Alfred Street and Blue Boar Street.

First, the honest bit: this is not the medieval Bear Inn. The original Bear stood on the High Street, and when that older inn was rebuilt as private housing in eighteen oh one, the name moved here... to a pub already trading as the Jolly Trooper since seventeen seventy-four. Oxford, like many old cities, is perfectly capable of giving a building a borrowed ancestry and then acting as if nothing odd happened.

What you’re looking at began life in the early seventeenth century as the home of the ostler for the coaching inn. An ostler was the man who met your horse at the gate, watered it, rubbed it down, and found it a stall for the night. Not glamorous, not famous, absolutely essential. If the inn ran smoothly, some tired traveler praised the landlord... while the ostler did the muddy work out back. That feels very Oxford, really: the polished front, and the labor that made it possible tucked just out of sight.

If you check the exterior photo in the app, you can see how modest the place still looks from the street. It was never the grand frontage on the High. It was the working end of the operation. And behind that stucco skin, the old timber frame still survives. You can’t see it from out here, but inside, some original timber framing remains visible near the top of the staircase. That hidden structure helped earn the building formal protection when it received Grade II listed status in January of nineteen fifty-four.

There’s another layer to the ground under this pub. This corner stood on the site of Saint Edward’s churchyard, and evidence from the cellar has confirmed that rather directly. Human bones turned up there in recent years. So yes... even the basement has a longer memory than the sign outside.

But The Bear’s most famous story belongs to a named publican, Alan Course. In nineteen fifty-two, he started collecting the cut-off ends of club ties. The deal was wonderfully specific: surrender the end of your tie, and you got half a pint of beer in return. Over time, that became more than a gimmick. It became nightly work. Staff with scissors in apron pockets, a pencil for labeling, and one more snippet pinned up before the next round. Not one grand gesture, just repetition... shift after shift, year after year.

If you look at the interior image on your screen, you’ll see the result: thousands of tie ends crowding the walls and even the low ceiling. More than four thousand five hundred of them now, from schools, colleges, clubs, sports teams. Colin Dexter even used the collection in an Inspector Morse novel, where a tie becomes a clue. Naturally, in Oxford, even the pub decor can end up doing detective work.

So this corner tells a very working story: the ostler with the horses, the landlord with the scissors, the bar staff who kept the ritual alive across decades. Not the people who usually get statues.

When you’re ready, head on to eighty-four High Street, about a two-minute walk away. If you fancy returning later, The Bear opens from noon every day, closes between around ten-thirty and eleven, and prices are moderate.

On your left, look for a long pale-stone frontage with a row of tall arched openings and a plain roofline behind it: that repeated arcade is the Covered Market.

Oxford built this place to clear “untidy, messy and unsavoury” meat stalls off the High Street. In seventeen seventy-two, a new market committee - half town, half university, because Oxford likes shared control almost as much as it likes an argument - accepted an estimate of nine hundred and sixteen pounds and ten shillings for twenty butchers’ shops, roughly one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in today’s money. John Gwynn, the architect who also designed Magdalen Bridge, drew up the plans, including this High Street front with its four entrances, and the market officially opened on the first of November, seventeen seventy-four. After seventeen seventy-three, meat could be sold only inside the market.

From that practical beginning grew one of Oxford’s great working interiors. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see the covered arcade inside, where permanent stalls spread out from those first butcher shops into produce, dairy, fish, and much later bakeries and gift shops. The building was enlarged in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, then added to again in the late nineteenth century, and it now carries Grade II listed status, meaning it is legally protected for its historic character.

But the real story lives in the families. David John, often described as the market’s last butcher, got his first job at twelve in Aldens. By twenty he was working for Michael Feller here; by twenty-two, the two had bought a shop together. He said, “Christ Church was our main customer... When you’re supplying three hundred and fifty students, you’d got to know you have that amount of meat available and ready.” That is Oxford in one sentence: the town feeding the gown, one college sitting at a time. His own family carried a long chain of labor too - a Norwegian great-great-grandfather who docked in Cardiff, met a local girl, and stayed; a father on the footplates, shoveling coal for steam engines. David said a lifetime on cold flagstones had done for his knees.

The Fellers carried the other half of that trade. M Feller and Daughter butchered here from nineteen seventy-nine to twenty twenty-three, and when the shop closed, Mitzi Feller wrote, “After over forty years, Feller’s family-run business has come to a sad decision to close our shop.” If you want the older roots, look at the butcher’s counter in the app image and picture the generations behind it.

Then there is Catherine Brown, who opened her café here in nineteen twenty with the motto, “Plain food, well cooked and plenty of it,” and the even better line, “I have no customers, only friends.” That may be the market at its best: labor without fuss, women running businesses, and family names lasting longer than fashions. Today more than fifty independent traders work under this roof, and Bonner’s greengrocer has traded here continuously since nineteen fifty-two.

So hold those three final images for a moment... David John on aching knees, Mitzi Feller signing a closing letter, Catherine Brown insisting her customers were friends. When you’re ready, head on to Carfax Tower, about a two-minute walk away; and if you want to come back inside later, the market generally opens from eight to five-thirty Monday to Wednesday, until ten Thursday to Saturday, and from ten to five on Sunday.

Look for the rough pale-stone tower rising in a plain rectangle, topped with battlements and a clock face - the stubborn last piece of St Martin's Church.

This seventy-four-foot tower is all that remains of twelfth-century St Martin's, Oxford's official City Church from about eleven twenty-two until eighteen ninety-six, when the city demolished the main church to make more room for traffic. Even medieval buildings, it seems, could lose an argument with road planning.

On the evening of Tuesday the tenth of February, thirteen fifty-five, two students, Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, drank in the Swindlestock Tavern at the south-west corner of Carfax. They complained about the wine. John of Barford, the landlord and also that year's mayor, answered with what a chronicler called stubborn and saucy language... so one student threw a quart pot at his head. St Martin's bell rang the alarm, and bakers, brewers, vintners, and merchants joined the fight. Around twenty townspeople died, and sixty-two scholars - perhaps sixty-three, depending on whose counting you prefer.

Every year after that, the mayor, bailiffs, and citizens processed to St Mary's to pay sixty-three pence, until the first of February, eighteen twenty-five. Take a glance at your screen for the tower surviving alone and St Mary's, where that ritual apology ended.

Yet this same church also served the poor. In fifteen forty-five, churchwardens set a bench against the east wall. By fifteen sixty-one people called it the Penniless Bench. Later, laborers waited there for hire, and on market days butter sellers spread their goods on the same stone. Hold onto that shared patch of Oxford life... then make your way to St Michael at the North Gate, about three minutes from here.

On your right, pale Cotswold stone rises in steep gabled blocks, crowned by a tall square library tower. The final section of the Oxford Canal into central Oxford opened on the first of January, seventeen ninety, then ran under Worcester Street to a coal wharf beside New Road. For a century and a half, bargees and coal-heavers worked here while dons walked past. Then William Morris returned in another form: the Longwall bicycle apprentice, starting work at fifteen, later Baron Nuffield in nineteen thirty-four and Viscount in nineteen thirty-eight. In nineteen thirty-seven he bought this basin for one hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and seventy-three pounds, filled it in by nineteen fifty-one, and built his college on part of the old wharf. On your screen, the tower marks the first new Oxford tower in two hundred years. Austen Harrison first drew it Mediterranean; Nuffield called that "un-English," so Harrison redrew it in Cotswold style and builders worked from nineteen forty-nine to nineteen sixty. An apprentice's success bought him a wharf, then buried it. Oxford Castle is two minutes away; the college usually opens weekdays and shuts on weekends.

Look for a broad straight roadway edged by pale stone and brick civic buildings, with a rounded castle mound rising beside it and bits of battlement-like crenellation giving the whole stretch a faintly fortified look.

New Road sounds practical, almost boring... which is unfair, because the ground beside you is ridiculously old. Oxford Castle took shape here between ten seventy-one and ten seventy-three, when the Norman baron Robert D'Oyly the elder planted his fortress on the edge of the city. But the oldest standing fabric is older still: St George’s Tower, probably late Saxon, from around ten twenty, a watch tower guarding the west gate. If you want a quick visual, have a look at the mound on your screen in image five. That great earth hump is the surviving motte, the raised mound of a Norman castle. In eleven forty-two, during King Stephen’s siege, Empress Matilda escaped from here across the frozen Castle Mill Stream. English history does enjoy an implausible getaway.

New Road itself arrived much later, in seventeen sixty-nine to seventy, when builders drove a new turnpike through what remained of the castle’s outer ramparts and ditch. Christ Church chose to preserve the old mound as what it called a venerable monument of antiquity. Meaning: perhaps do not flatten the thousand-year-old hill.

After the Civil War, Oxford Castle served primarily as the local prison. In seventeen eighty-five, the Oxford County Justices bought it and brought in the London architect William Blackburn to rebuild punishment on a more systematic Georgian scale. In eighteen eighty-eight, national prison reforms renamed it H-M Prison Oxford. In a city famous for scholarly gowns, this was the county-justice machinery that kept order for the wider town... grim, practical, and very much not on the prospectus.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, executions here were public, ticketed spectacle. On the twenty-fourth of March, eighteen sixty-three, William Calcraft hanged Noah Austin on the gatehouse roof before nine to ten thousand spectators: Oxford’s last public hanging. Calcraft gets remembered. The bricklayers who dug out the gallows, and the people who cleaned up afterward, mostly do not.

Then, on the tenth of August, nineteen fifty-two, a short squat man stepped off the train from London at Oxford Railway Station. His name was Albert Pierrepoint, the executioner. Two days later he entered the condemned cell with the prison governor and the chaplain. The two guards who had remained with Oliver Butler all night held his arms while Pierrepoint strapped his wrists. Butler was twenty-three. Rose Meadows, whom he had killed, was twenty-one.

The prison closed in nineteen ninety-six. The former cell blocks reopened as the Malmaison hotel in two thousand and five, and the heritage site followed in two thousand and six. You can see that afterlife on your screen in image three. So as you leave, keep two people in mind: the unnamed guards who held Butler through the night, and the chambermaid on D-wing today. Same building, same truth... places like this run on hidden labor. When you’re ready, continue on to Oxford, about five minutes away.

Look for the low, flat cast-iron bridge with straight beams crossing the narrow Castle Mill Stream, a plain Victorian span whose very lack of fuss is its signature.

Hythe sounds tidy enough, but it comes from the Old English word hithe, meaning a wharf or landing place. So this street is really named for its old job. People were unloading cargo here by at least twelve eighty-two, and Oseney Abbey put up the first known bridge between twelve hundred and twelve ten, probably in wood. In thirteen eighty-three, Oxford replaced it with a stone bridge of three round arches. The version in front of you arrived much later, in eighteen sixty-one, when the Oxford engineer John Galpin gave the crossing its current iron body.

And this was never some picturesque little footbridge. It was a working threshold. In the sixteenth century, the city’s wharf here handled hay, wood, stone, and slate. Freemen paid half a penny per load, others paid a penny - enough to make every crossing count. Even access had a price.

If you glance at your screen, the stream under the bridge gives you the setting the old boatmen knew best. They brought goods up from the upper Thames, but the trip could be miserable. Millers downstream controlled the weirs and the water. They charged heavy tolls, guarded their rights fiercely, and sometimes kept boats waiting for days before releasing enough water for passage. A flash-lock barge, by the way, was a river boat that depended on a rush of released water to get through.

So picture the bargee here: stuck at Iffley or Sandford for days, sleeping on deck, then finally reaching Hythe to unload hay at dawn. For six centuries, the stone in college walls, the slate on Merton roofs, and the hay for stable horses all crossed here on somebody’s back. Next, we’ll head toward Nuffield College, where the old canal basin once spread out beyond this bridge. And unlike the boatmen, you can cross here at any hour.

Look for the pale, rough Coral Rag stone tower, a plain rectangular Saxon shaft with small arched openings and an old clock face set into its upper stage.

This is the sort of building that makes younger Oxford landmarks seem... a bit needy. The church began around the years one thousand to ten fifty, and the tower from about ten forty still stands here in front of you. The parish makes the bold claim that this is the oldest extant building in Oxford, and honestly, it has a strong case. That tough local stone, Coral Rag, is not graceful stuff. It is hard, stubborn, and durable... which turns out to be a very good personality for surviving a thousand years.

Its name tells you exactly why it matters. St Michael at the North Gate stood on the site of Oxford’s north gate when the city still wrapped itself in defensive walls. So this was not only a church. It also worked as part of the gatehouse: watchmen above, toll-collectors below, and a bell-rope calling the city to closure at dusk. A church tower, a checkpoint, and a practical bit of civic machinery all at once. Oxford has always liked multitasking when rent was involved.

That working life grew darker with Bocardo Prison, which occupied rooms in the watchtower by the North Gate. In fifteen fifty-five, Bishops Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer were imprisoned there before the burnings nearby on what is now Broad Street. Cranmer met his end in fifteen fifty-six. The prison connected directly to the church tower by a passage, which gives this peaceful frontage a rather grim second life in the imagination.

If you want a glimpse of that lost gateway world, have a look at the before-and-after image in the app; the church stays reassuringly steady while Cornmarket around it shifts into a cleaner modern streetscape.

The gate and prison did not survive. Parliament approved redevelopment in seventeen seventy, and workers demolished the old North Gate and Bocardo in seventeen seventy-one when Cornmarket needed widening. But one harsh little survivor remains: the cell door from the Bocardo room where Thomas Cranmer was held before his execution. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see that preserved door now kept in the tower.

You can still climb the tower today: ninety-seven steps, past an original clockwork mechanism that a parish clock-winder once wound by hand every week. And that may be my favorite part of this place. Not only bishops and martyrs, but the gatekeeper, the turnkey, the bell-ringer, the sexton, the clock-winder... ordinary workers keeping the city running while the gowned university carried on above them.

When you are ready, head toward Blackwell Bookshop on Broad Street, about a four-minute walk from here. If you want to go inside first, the church usually opens from nine AM to six PM most days, with shorter hours on Saturday and different Sunday opening.

Broad Street is easy to spot as an unusually wide paved avenue lined with long honey-colored stone fronts, with the rounded Sheldonian Theatre and the grand classical Clarendon Building marking its eastern end.

On New Year’s Day, eighteen seventy-nine, Benjamin Henry Blackwell opened a shop here with a room only twelve feet square and a stock of seven hundred used books. That is not the beginning of an empire... it is the beginning of a cupboard with ambitions.

B-H Blackwell knew the trade from the ground up. He was the son of Oxford’s first city librarian, but there was nothing especially cushy about his route in. He left school at thirteen and apprenticed himself to the Oxford bookseller Charles Richards for one shilling a week. Thirteen years old, a shilling a week, and straight into work among shelves, customers, and accounts. From that schoolboy start, he built the bookshop that became the best-known university bookseller in Britain.

Broad Street was the perfect stage for it. Long before the book trade took over, this broad strip began as the ditch outside Oxford’s city wall, then served as the horse market, which explains its old name, Horsemonger Street. Later, as the walls lost their military use, the ditch turned into plots for houses and shops. So this street kept reinventing itself: from defense line, to market, to the intellectual shopfront of Oxford. If you glance at your screen, the image shows how tightly the university presses in here, with major academic buildings crowding the east end.

And what buildings. Across Broad Street sit colleges like Balliol and Trinity. Nearby stand the Sheldonian, designed by Christopher Wren, and the Clarendon Building, where Oxford University Press once ran its printing. It is one of those Oxford places where town business and university grandeur stop pretending they are separate things.

Blackwell’s proved that neatly. B-H’s son, Basil Blackwell, known as “the Gaffer,” took over in nineteen twenty-four when his father died and ran the firm for decades. Under the family, the shop grew quite literally beneath the gown. In nineteen sixty-six, Blackwell’s opened the Norrington Room under the lawn of Trinity College next door: ten thousand square feet, three miles of shelving, and at one point a Guinness record for the world’s largest single room selling books. Only in Oxford does a bookshop quietly expand under a college lawn and call it perfectly normal.

The shop also linked writers, readers, and the street outside. In nineteen fifteen, Blackwell’s published J-R-R Tolkien’s first poem, Goblin Feet. Yes, that Tolkien - the same man whose Ducker rugby boots, bought for fourteen shillings and sixpence, survive in a Bodleian ledger not far from here. Customer, author, scholar, sportsman... Oxford does like its people thoroughly overqualified.

The Blackwell family kept the business for one hundred and forty-three years, across five generations, until the sale to Waterstones in February, twenty twenty-two. That is a remarkable run for any family business, let alone one that began with a boy who left school at thirteen and earned a shilling a week.

Keep that apprentice in mind. Oxford loves its grand facades, but some of its biggest stories begin with someone learning the job the hard way. We will hear that note again by our final stop. For now, continue to number six Turl Street, about a two-minute walk from here.