Cowley Regenerated
Town and gown have always been uneasy neighbours in Oxford. On Broad Street it is hard to stick out a foot without tripping up a student or a tourist. In the suburbs the university’s influence is scarcely felt. Then there are the borders, where the two spheres of existence collide. One such frontline territory is the Cowley Road. Once a distinctly downmarket area, recent years have seen it becoming increasingly gentrified.
Billboards advertise new property developments clearly aimed at buyers with a fair chunk of cash to spare. The blackboard outside Kazbar, a tapas bar which has received favourable reviews in various national newspapers, reads “positive hard-working long-haired freaky people apply within” • an appeal pitched directly at Oxford students if ever I heard one.
Further yet is Door 74, whose tempting menu includes “new season lamb cutlets served on a rustic pea and mint puree” for a very reasonable £13.95. And yet, only a door up from Uniiki (for all your pointless-batik-frippery needs), we come to the flaking wooden door of the Adult Shop, which offers me not only books and videos, but a bewilderingly generous fifty per cent exchange on the above.
Outside the dilapidated community centre, I stop to talk to Richard Simon Pearce, who is sitting on a wall and taking the occasional draw on a stubby roll-up. Richard is a forty-eight year old songwriter and a native of Reading. He has been both homeless and an alcoholic in the past, but at the moment he has a place to live and is watching his drinking carefully. He is frank about the problems of the Cowley area, but not unduly worried by them.
“You’ve always got your drug dealers and criminals,” he tells me. “That’s just a part of any community.” Richard is widely travelled. Why does he come back to Cowley? Oxford City Council even repeatedly refused to grant him even the basic social fund loan. But it is the people that draw him back. His personal philosophy is live and let live, and this is apparently the dominant mood in Cowley as well.
As we are talking, a pretty group of girls in college hoodies stagger past, bursting into shrieking jeers. He gazes wearily after them and pulls on his can of White Lightning. “You get them, people like that, coming up and causing trouble.’ I feel a surge of fury at bloody Oxford students. Crass, loud and wealthy, traipsing round as if the whole city is their nightclub.
Then I remember the Bod card in my back pocket, and realise how perilously close I came to slumping down on the wall and asking Richard if he could spare a Rizla. The Cowley Road is changing. New pretentious eateries and boutiques continue to spring up.
11th May 2006