April 12th 2023

Down in The Dumps - How Cowley Car Workers helped win WWII

Find out how a car factory switched production to support the wartime aircraft manufacturing industry

May 10th 2023

Real Oxford - A Journey Through the Mind of a Unique City

By Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French Literature, Oxford University

June 14th 2023

The History of Oxford United Football Club

By Martin Brodetsky, the official OUFC historian

September 13th 2023

TAKING TO THE AIR: PAUL NASH, OXFORD AND WORLD WAR 2 PROPAGANDA

Presented by Peter Vass, Brookes University

October 11th 2023

GILBERT WHITE - THE FATHER OF NATURAL HISTORY

An Illustrated Biography of Gilbert White - The Father of Natural History

Local raconteur and amateur local history researcher Maurice East presents the latest findings from his research into the fascinating history of our local car factory.

Oxford, city of dreaming spires, bicycles, Inspector Morse, tourists, gentility. Or perhaps a less familiar place? Jericho, once seedy backstreets with Oxford’s main porn cinema and an astonishing concentration of pubs, now mythologised by Philip Pullman and gentrified beyond the wildest imaginings of the college groundsmen and porters for whom it was designed. Cowley Road, the ethnic mix of restaurants, the core of Labour-voting Oxford East ward, and one of the first to elect Green councillors. Iffley and Osney Island, characterful places where one side of the street is barges, the other terraced houses with watermarks on the front doors. Cowley and Blackbird Leys, rough, industrial but also textured by modern history. In Summertown and North Oxford, huge, elegant houses back up to the river, and North Parade has crescents of Georgian splendour.

Mesopotamia attests to Oxford’s history as a place of military adventure, and with the arrival of one of the UK’s largest mosques, the consequences of those adventures, in a thriving and mostly happy multiculturalism. There are also places of such blandness that McGuinness relishes the challenge of writing about them. And there are the colleges, the bookshops, galleries and museum, the city centre prison, the students, the tourists, the refugees and asylum seekers. Oxford’s combination of history and the Establishment, and of transient population and change make the city a compelling subject.

Patrick McGuinness is a novelist and poet and Oxford academic, who has lived in the city for over thirty years. In this talk he will celebrate the everyday and the everyday places, and explore Oxford as a place of reflection and connection - a place for walkers and thinkers interested in the city beyond the university.

From Headington to Wembley

The artist, Paul Nash, spent World War Two living in and around Oxford. It was here that he painted some of the most iconic war art ever produced using as his inspiration the wrecked plane dump at Cowley. However, his art did not always please the Services hierarchy as Nash had a very individual notion of propaganda. Peter Vass tells the story of those war years in Oxford and Nash's contribution to it.

Youtuber link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHPHzWOP99E&t=2011s

Steph Holt lives in Florence Park and will share her passion for this fascinating character. GILBERT WHITE was born in his grandfather’s vicarage at Selborne, Hampshire, in 1720 and was educated by the Poet Laureate Thomas Wharton before studying at Oriel College, Oxford. He was awarded his deacon’s orders in 1746, became fully ordained in 1749, and held several curacies in Hampshire and Wiltshire. After his father died in 1758 he returned to ‘The Wakes’, his family home in Selborne, where he lived as the curate and began his lifelong habit of recording the natural world, keeping journals, publishing articles for the Royal Society, and writing letters to leading botanists and commentators of his day. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne was first published in 1789 and has been in print ever since.