What effect does the UK’s growing inequality and poverty have on Oxford, asks Professor Danny Dorling; “on a place that’s winning? This isn’t a northern town. This isn’t a poorer southern town, or an inner borough of London. And it’s possibly the most expensive city between here and San Francisco going in one direction – and here and San Francisco going in the other direction.”
One of the most visible signs, he tells an audience at Iffley Church Hall, Oxford on 6 February 2024, is the disappearance of children from the city; fewer than 1000 children took GCSEs in state schools in Oxford in 2019. In a city full of private schools, what is happening to the state schools, the children who attend them and those who work in them?
This is an audio-only recording of a talk given by Professor Dorling and introduced by Ansa Khan, a youth worker at Donnington Doorstep, the youth club and drop-in centre near Donnington Bridge, founded in 1984. This event was a fundraiser for www.donnington-doorstep.org.uk and was organised by the Iffley History Society and the Friends of St Mary’s Iffley.
In his talk, Professor Dorling, who is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and author of a number of acclaimed books, looks at the statistics and numbers behind what is, he says, a very unusual city – and not for the reasons typically given. Could it be that Oxford the way it is, and becoming even more odd, he quips toward the end, because so many senior Conservative politicians lost their virginity here?
One thing worth noting, he says, is that it has become a city of very few children and young adults, other than high fee-paying foreign students. Has some Pied Piper of Hamelin taken them away? Or is it low wages and a vast divide between the city’s privileged, and the rest? A century ago the most common job for working-class women in the UK was working in service, Professor Dorling says; one of the reasons they hated it was that they were not allowed to have children. Today, many people in Oxford are working in the equivalent of service now – and can’t afford to have children. And primary and secondary school teachers who work here certainly can’t afford to live here.
Although Oxford remains an unusual city, what it tells us, Professor Dorling concludes, is about the cost the entire country pays for a rising tide of austerity, inequality and injustice.
Visit Danny Dorling’s website:
Read about his latest book “Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State”
https://www.dannydorling.org/books/shatterednation/
Find out more about Donnington Doorstep and how to support its essential work for parents, children and young people:
https://www.donnington-doorstep.org.uk/
We’re very lucky I mean what a turnout brilliant it’s a great turnout for absolutely amazing person um I first listened to I went to some paches and heard you talk about um brexit the book rule Bania yeah and there was a capacity Crow there and um I think I got picked to ask
A question which I was quite nervous about anyway um and then um I went to Blackwells to hear you talk about this new book He’s written about dozen book The shattered nation and um inequality and the geography of a failing State now um Danny doesn’t deal in
Politics but he does deal in data and facts and often um you know what he says is uh definitely resonates and he’s going to talk here about Oxford and what is I thought the question might be what is a social geographer but I’ll leave you with that one and first of all though
Welcome Ana KH who’s just going to talk about Donington doorstep there is a connection between the two okay so and should I take it away yeah take it over hi everyone it’s nice to meet you I guess I’ll stand there so you can see me make sense yeah yeah you all right I’m
Start I’m better on my feet anyway I’m theth manager for Donington doorstep which was founded in 1984 I believe with the help and support of Danny’s mom and a group of other really incredibly powerful women who just so happen to be moms um it’s been this year it will be
40 years since it’s been running and functioning providing services to The Wider community and uh we are looking I guess this year to try and expand the services that we provide to our community had a very positive meeting with the management team uh this morning and basically the only way that we can
Do it is with further support from the community to be able to continue these amazing services that we’ve been providing um I don’t want to say too much I guess or waffle on too much but um I am really happy and proud to say that it has a longstanding legacy and
Proud to be part of the team that’s actually made substantial changes in many people’s lives and families across the across ox4 region and we still continue to provide amazing services for the local families and yeah I guess I’m just gonna hand it over to Dan you can
Do the social geography stuff keep it nice [Applause] um thank you for coming it’s slightly disconcerting speaking here because there are people here who know my mom which doesn’t normally happen when I speak publicly um and I was going to read out this thing which is almost unreadable my mom
Was only involved in some advice at the beginning of do door uh she worked in play groups she might have been the regional leader of the police School play group Association play grps were an enormous thing in the 60s bigger in the 70s uh Donan leaded the second one the
Waiting list was enormous the play groups were needed for the mothers primarily not for the children that’s what they realized uh I’m partly not reading out prob because it’s it’s um not easy to read the letter she uh the speech she gave when door was opened but partly because it talks about how
Difficult it was having an overactive toddler me uh and three three other boys of the six at a time when you are trapped in your house in Oxford uh this is church County Center at that time we move to Rising Hurst uh my mom becomes a do good uh so
She’s one of the do good by the time Donan doorstep is being created but it’s incredible story and this is one of the sort of sad things if you reflect now is a group of women came together raised the money got £12,000 got the toin shipped
In got everybody to do the work and built it right this isn’t the kind of thing that happens anymore what happens now is you keep it going you don’t imagine building a new one and you rais money for food banks which of course we didn’t have to do uh back then so this
Is going to get a bit this is going to get a bit depressing and I’ll try I’ll just be half an hour cuz the most interesting thing is what you got to say and I I’ll try and lift it up towards the end we often wondered what would happen if you can remember
1979 what would happen if 1979 never ended 1979 was kind of like when nania turned cold and wicked witch came in and all the animals were frozen and mass unemployment began and the very last jobs the jobs in the car fact the new ones didn’t start
My uh year at school was the last year when the boys were taken on the work in the car factory that’s what most of them did for my school and it was the last time we what happens if it doesn’t pay what happens if that inequality that
Began in the 1980s which Rose and Rose and Rose and Rose doesn’t come down again what what occurs and this is it and it looks quite nice this is this is Oxford um you can see quite it’s it’s all okay so I’ll press you a little bit
About things um of course this is an aent City in a poor country we now have the highest Sy inequality rate in all of Europe give or take Bulgaria we’ve almost certainly beaten Bulgaria but they’re late with their numbers the poorest F people in the UK
Are now poorer than the poorest fifth in the majority of Eastern Europe and the statistics keep on getting worse is there a bit of cloth that I passed that’s going around somewhere you’ve got it keep passing it around uh that is this is an experiment to see if this works uh so no
Slides uh but that is 150 diagrams that would have been in the shattered Britain book if the publisher let me have diagrams um there’s lots of data you can open it up and have a look don’t worry about hurting it uh this is all based on on
Numbers I can go through the statistics about the UK what’s interesting about Oxford and that the of inequality was published in 2019 and OB is just about the only city in the country that has people from every income desile in it um so there are representatives of the
Best of 10 of people in in the city that is mainly North Fox and park town so a little bit here um you know bit in headington then representatives from dl9 almost as well off as DL 10 DL 7l six the same proportion right down to the poorest t
For people uh in the country and you don’t get that in general in general what you get is an area either poorer or is pretty rich like Kensington and so on not this kind of uh division when I six we move from here I can remember going to Italy lock as a
Child we moved from here to Rising her because there were six boys you can’t have six boys well not if you’re middle class you can’t have six boys in the free bed house um and I grew up on the green Ro roundabout which still has one of the
Widest social differentials around it uh so a social geographer is somebody who is interested in the inequalities in society and I was interested in the inequalities in society because I to grow up in a very unequal part of the country and you’re aware of this as a child you’re aware that what determines
What children go on to do isn’t whether they’re clever or hardworking at school it is simply which way they walk to school that told you what they were going to do or of course what school they go to but Oxford in the 1970s early 1980s was the most equal
Be we had just desegregated the school system we got rid of the grammar I would have failed the 11 plus of course what would have happened to me is what used to happen my father’s a doctor if I failed 11 plus I’d been straight into modeling back then you might think not
Nowadays but back then I would we partly desegregated our schools because the middle class couldn’t necessarily afford mod in anymore they didn’t want their children go to Second models but anyway for the first time ever most of the children of Oxford went to the same school and what they did originally is
Just go to new school because what else do you do and that that was my ched we had full employment we had wellp paid jobs you could get married you could start a family and you made 20s you could have holidays one of three children longer
Has a summer holiday not for a week anymore in England but we’re in Oxford so does it matter this this is the interesting question what is the effect on the place that’s winning this isn’t a Northern Town this isn’t a poor southern town this isn’t an inner bur of
London it’s possibly the most expensive city between here and San Francisco going in One Direction and here and San Francisco going in the other direction um what do you get what happens the first thing you get is less and less children and less and less young adults right you’ve
Proven this to me tonight have a look around okay um but you don’t need me just to Asser it’s in the sensus data you can see that the kind of P Piper of hamling has come to ox and taking the children away 2019 there were less than a
Thousand children taking their GCS in the state schools in the city that’s the kind of happens when people with children can’t be in this city you can’t have children in this city why does that matter because there used to be a group a century ago who couldn’t have
Children that was the group which all the women in this audience would be the most likely to join which was working in service and if you became a servant you couldn’t have children which is one of the reasons people hated working in service with it effect people are
Working in service again there are people in this city who can survive here can live here can’t get a bed here they’re your primary school teachers your Secondary School teachers they’re sharing houses like students used to but they can’t have children now you might think oh well
It’s Oxford it’s special and we got to be number one in the world haven’t we so that’s okay we’re going to be a search hotel it’ll work but things begin to fall apart and the problem is that you get used to them falling apart so you don’t see what it is that you’re
Losing you get used to the fact it’s incredibly hard to recruit people to certain jobs you get used to the fact that the buses keep breaking down if you’ve ever wondered why when you’re sitting on the bus London and it breaks down and pulls into the lake yeah
The side another bus normally comes and picks you up but why the bus is breaking down that’s because you can’t afford the mechanics because the mechanics can’t afford to live here we are supposedly getting 180 electric double backck of buses which is brilliant we may be the first uh fully
Electric bus city in England but the problems of drivers the irony the Great for me I was born in’ 68 I left here in 86 I came back 11 years ago is to find University associate professors on salaries of 60 70 80 or 90,000 desperately trying to buy the homes of car
Workers and with a little bit of family money or quite a lot of family money say 100 or 150 Grand you might a to buy one of the nicer larger free beds in Florin Park it’s not the same though as the houses that the car workers lived in and there were up to
40,000 car workers mostly men mostly with Wives With Children it was different city it’s not the same house because it’s 40 years older more delapidated at cost of Fortune but you feel so lucky you’ve managed to do it that some people can that is the associate professors in the
University and they are only aemp of the staff of what keeps the university going I shouldn’t really care about a university because I grew up here uh and if you grow up here you may know you really really don’t like University um but I work for it
Now and the two universities and the hospitals and a few other things are really the only game in town one nice thing that’s happened to O is that the old reasons for aminos which were absolute fear of the Stokes and the weasels over there with the Willows and c space on this city
That’s almost every children’s book was based on the this city but the animosity the nastiness the reason why Mory College built a mo around it in the 80s the birot because of the vaping local children which is a bit insulting if you’re one of them the reason why they built a m
Around mland the reason why they took away the bridges and all the other roots that there were across across the city was fear and the fear was understandable particularly in the 80s because you got a city for the car workers and their children and particularly their
Sons Market was ours and the High Street was ours and a lot was ours and you hide in the jcr and you occasionally come out and if you’re in your FR coat you’re in trouble which didn’t create a particularly good socialization for those two young men when I was
16 you can see where that came from now if the town decides not to be particularly nice to one part of it it’s actually not being nice to people who work in the middle of the town for the University uh the example I’ll give you is what happened last summer Last Summer the private schools go on holiday you know when that happens the private schools F of our kids go private private schools go on holiday all his cars off the road Tuscan full signed put up uh at the cycle way crossing over into Maron saying that the bridges will be
Closed on August the 10th I think it is for 10 weeks now there are only about four ways across that River there’s a thousand- year old bridge okay there’s the Ring Road there further south and there’s that little uh cycle way that goes across now the problem of saying you’re
Going to close that cycle way where the land is owned by the University although operated by the County Council although involving a private firm owned by FR billionaires who live on an island in the Caribbean the problem of of saying you’re going to close that Cycle Way for
10 weeks from August the 10th is it’ll be closed when the schools start and there are still children in the city and they cycle to school many of them and they cycle that way they cycle across from all over the city to get to the swan which is a new school
The First new school in 50 years they cycle the other way to get to mland because their CH their parents don’t want them cycling over the second most dangerous roundabout in the south of England it’s just the plane where three members of University staff were killed in the two years
Before the University made a decision to close the only safe Boot and they produce a plan that says oh don’t worry you can go around plane or you can cycle all the way up to the Ring Road and around again to get the school right now why did they do that how me
Confidence they did it because in the past you would do it because East Ox was full of those other children who didn’t matter but east Ox wasn’t for of those other children anymore half of the children cycling across their cycle Bridges were wearing little suity uniforms right for the schools that cost
Lot of money to go to and I welcomed it there’s kind of desegregation of the city going on uh the short story of what happened eventually was that almost just a day before the schools went back they decided that there’s going to be a route you could actually go that didn’t
Involve your child on their first day at Secondary School having to cycle that’s the kind of stupidity that happens nowadays and is utterly unnecessary we really should have a whole set of roots across this River should be a safe cycling City you shouldn’t worry about where
Your child Goes to School in this city and how they’re going to get there there’s no need for this city to be dangerous we should be able to organize ourselves ideally we should be able to do things like build Donan doorsteps again but we shouldn’t be in this kind of paralysis where if
Somebody comes up with some traffic scheme it becomes the biggest thing new story on the planet it was broadcast on Australian TV you shouldn’t need the chief Druid coming from Stonehenge asserting the rights of people to be able to get to celebrate the soul system worried that
The city of Oxford is going to cut them off if you know that story you shouldn’t have Lawrence Fox addressing 2,000 people in Broad Street all Pi cor you’ve come a long long way down from a city that did things like set up hundreds of halfway houses for people leaving Community psychiatric
Hospitals set up Ox found and all kinds of other things long way down to not even be able to rationally discuss the traffic scheme so you can find a way of fitting your 180 electric buses in and 180 electric buses by the way are not for people with cargo bikes CU you can’t
Get a cargo bike onto a bus anyway just trying to wind people up um I did promise half an hour so I will I will speed up the schools are a m the schools are a mess the divisions between the schools are a mess I challenge you to find me another city in
Europe with this wider division segregation of its children with this amount of fear amongst its parents when the allocations of primary schools come out about what might happen to their children with people willing to pay this much money to move away from where most of
The babies are born in the city which is down this way towards the southeast and move their children up and up desperately trying to get into a couple of schools which still get worst GC results and the six best schools in Sheffield and those are the posh comprehensives
We shouldn’t necessarily have so many children from abroard whose parents are paying 50,000 for the seven international schools we should at least keep an eye on what the US going on today it’s an incredibly segregated City and this doesn’t produce the most educated children in the world
Somehow we can test the ability of young adults by the age of 24 and we find in all of Europe the ones who can’t actually do math despite having an a grade at it at age 16 who can’t problem solve as well and certainly of course we don’t have literary skills of anywhere
Else in Europe but you might have an a grade in French it’s not the same and you actually find that our children are not poly educated you could do the same for our universities and actually see how able the graduates are at 24 anyway I could get in trouble for doing
That because of course we produced the brightest and cleverest on the planet that kind of fact um and it begins to get embarrassing in a country that is falling apart the extremes of it nationally the last two years we’ve seen the biggest rise in infant mortality and mortality of children between age one
And four nothing to do with a pandemic rebound if you think of that little boy in skes where his death was revealed on the 16th of January he died cold up starving next to his father who had a heart attack at 60 nobody asked why did the
Dad have a heart attack at 60 why do we have illness rates of people in their 60s so high at least they did ask why did the little boy starve to death in skap m what they don’t say is there are areas of Oxford where the poverty rat is in SK
Nest at least in SC Nest the social work 24,000 a year can afford to live whereas how do you get your competent social workers to stay any the lake for time in Oxford it could happen here and they don’t say that when we look at the average heights of our
Children they’ve been falling since the children born in 2005 so children are getting shorter now the only other place in Europe where we recall that is in Germany for a couple of years when they let in 1.5 million syrians including roughly half of them children and children coming out of a
War zone tend to be shorter temp the national sets are awful but let just’s go back to this city because you can get the impression that everything works here sort of works because it’s changed everything every year gradually now you mentioned the women who set up do donon doorstep it wasn’t just Donington
Dors apologies to the older men in the room and you can correct me later but I’ve been quietly working my way through the Committees of 1970s and 80s who started the qual play scheme who got East Oxford Community Center going who did this it was all women
Might be the first time women were actually been able or empowered or felt they could or did but the city was transformed largely by women doing things pushing things and it wasn’t just what they did it was what they didn’t allow to happen it was the attitudes that said we
Are going to make sure that we have a decent play group provision the attitudes that said that the schools need to be good enough and need to work it was whole series of of attitudes back then and it’s flipped and it’s changed the city I left in the 1980s all the
Wards that fed the car Works were labor and you recognize the names of the counselors and often they worked in the car works and La met in count workers Social Club I come back and I find there’s a byelection in North Oxford and it’s red and green what kind of a planet is
This and the labor party now meet at a church in Summertown what’s happened right and it happened slowly and it happened gradually um but it’s very different and then I asked where are the houses CU I’ve lived in Sheffield and be next to donc cter and lived in leads and even
And everywhere I’d lived when I left Ox theyd built some houses right often quite a lot of houses so I come back haven’t built anything nothing the last housing was on the edge of rising H when I left it there’s little project to build a thing called Barton Park which is going to
Have a lot of council houses in it but then in the end didn’t I’ve got some pen houses at the top of it there’s something else happening nothing was it that you don’t need houses do you not need the people who are going to be in the houses can they
Just drive in from Birmingham 40,000 a day driving in over the green belt before the pandemic hit the least green green belt in the world with that amount of carbon being emitted by all those cars and people have to drive over the green belt because we have a green belt because we
Don’t want the people who service the city to be allowed to live anywhere near us what was the other complaint there microaggressions I’m stopping in less than five minutes little things yeah over the cycle path of course people ignored the ru that said you couldn’t cycle in the summer of course they
Did but somebody wanted to complain about all the the livero cyclists it’s terrible that the livero cyclists they cycling this way you know they shouldn’t it’s dangerous why do you think we have the livero cyclists who is it that they’re taking the piz Pizza to what is this
Group of people doing where do they sleep those kind of questions the kind of questions you didn’t ask in the 1920s or 1930s the kind of question that Sebastian didn’t ask of his servant in Bri’s head we visiting right that world we got away from but the world you’re going back to
Now why does it matter why why why be bothered if you’re in an aent successful city with a university raking in money from philanthropists some of the most Pleasant people on the planet that’s a diplomatic way putting isn’t it I can’t get in trouble for that
None of them can sue me if I say a lovely bunch of men why worry about it well you become a university that is reliant on people with money that is reliant on postgraduate students in the main and not undergraduate who can pay very high fees you become Reliance on heo
Airport which is the vital connection route if you’ve got students who need for various social reasons to fly many times a year home or dep parties you’re not actually that green a university you can put solar panels on the roof and heat pumps in the garden at
Wson but just don’t ask about the flying but it’s dangerous as well because what happens one day if the fashion for coming to the get a degree here goes what happens if you’re utterly reliant on the money of international students for getting a degree it’s not a safe
Model it’s less safe than relying on a particular kind of car being built by lay model which didn’t work but if you need a personal V to worry and it’s going to happen to all of us it’s different from worrying about bson and the infam morality figures and
The fact that they’ve gone up the fastest ever recorded in the last two years we’re all going to hopefully end up in hospital it’s so hopefully because the other thing is rather quick and a bit early right we’re all going to end up in hospitals we got a lot of hospitals here
But they’re falling apart story just to end on then think of your questions if you do short questions I promise short answers and it’ll be more fun than hearing me waffle I like kaying nicest thing about the city of the rivers so many of them have an
Inable kayak I go with friends normally with women uh which I need to tell you because otherwise this story would have really strange and I always have a spare paddle in a spare seat and I always invite uh anybody on the bank to come in which madees him a bit weird and there
Was a last up at the steps that cut us low looking a bit bewildered and so I said you want to come in with us and normally most people are sayane and they don’t say yes to a strange man offering put put in the C anyway she said yes I said what you
Doing she said I’m working at the John R if I’m a nurse and I said where you from she said Legos and then I I said can you swim she said no then I made a judgment call it’s only about 5 foot high there’s two of us and
My young female colleague is much bitter than me and could get her out and then I said have you ever been on the river before and she said no I thought this is fun I said have you ever been to London she said no said how long
Have you been in Oxford she’s 18 months said what do you do so I come down the wall by the river and you’re not working in the John mag but the family ever so par in Lagos that we ship fly nurses from Lagos in and then she said the sweetest thing
The river was absolutely dirty Brown full of the stuff it’s from the fields it’s not what we had but the ox sewer by the way is going I that’s a different because you can’t put that many people into a city and expect the sewer to work the river was incredibly Brown
Because it had rained a lot and all the soil had come off and she goes that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen well I get it you know even the child welcome of mud to some of is beautiful but the point of this story is that we’ve got to the
Point of flying people in from abroad and holding on to them for just about long enough until they can tell their family that they’re really really lonely and upset and that this wonderful town that everybody knows the name of in the world isn’t quite as great as it was
Made up to be but then the HR person we’ll find another bunch of women to put on another plane and we can keep the hospital going and that’s who if I stay here and you that’s who’s going to be looking after us in our last three four months of life in these
Hospitals right so if you just want a selfish reason to think we need some schools that work some housing that operates a bus system where the buses move like they move in North London just 20 miles an hour just get you there simple things not trams not that kind of
Fantasy that every single one of our Twin Cities in Europe has not the kind of student accommodation they have in Finland not the housing system they got in Vienna not the bus tickets you can buy in Germany nothing of that just just you know what people in other European
Countries had a decade or two ago we’ve got to do something about it otherwise we slowly become more and more like an elite American University Town which is a segregated bipolar Society with some winners and the majority of losers and people increasingly more and more frightened of each other
And other people getting their space or doing something that might spoil their view so they can’t sell their house for a million pounds and bail their own children out in the future we just become more and more scared of each other and that is the danger of what’s Happening Here uh in
The city I think it’s divided politically you probably know at the moment it’s been really interesting to watch it I’m just trying to stir up at this point for questions um I like it very much I think I’m very lucky to be back I think the university is changing but still so
Slowly I hate watching the way in which normal human beings who are appointed to academic posts at a university where suddenly you’re a trustee of a college and you in fact own part of it are slowly transformed into the kind of people you grew up not liking it’s interesting sociological experiment to
Watch how it happens but it isn’t necessary anymore the University of Oxford no longer hires its own graduates to be its dogs right it can’t because somebody is watching from outside and really you’ve got to look a little bit good um so people come in from all over the place which is great
But they come in still what was I told when I came I will stop because I’ve got two minutes over the person hiring me didn’t know I grew up here so they they said to me it’s lovely it’s brilliant houses are a bit expensive but the real problem is the
Schools but don’t worry there’s a European school which I’ve never h and obviously you’ll want your children to go there because you’re a bit left wing and officially it’s a stage School right now I’ve seen that in other Northern cities if you go to Newcastle still you’re told to live in jasmond
Colonial white Island kind of game but it’s quite odd for it to happen to you and particularly when these schools that they are avoiding aren’t the schools I went to then these are schools where half the children are going to University if they want and most of them if they you don’t
Have to go to university in fact you can go the far more if you don’t but most of the children who are going to University for most the state schools in Oxford are going to exactly the same universities that the people who are paying private are getting their children
Into why are they doing it and on that and now when I was young I told you I’d have been chucked into modling if we had the 11 plus when I was young if I go to mle I’d be 20 times more likely to go to university if I
Went to Cheney and I went to Cheney now if you’re 20 times more likely it’s worth paying the money isn’t it I mean that is a game changer and back then whatever it was the 78% of us went to University we were set for life
I mean you you really had to make a big mistake for things not to go well for you if you were a graduate from my age let alone my parents let alone my grandparents because I’ve been told off to say this but and Posh
Um why do they do it now what are you buying safety it’s not that safe from drugs in schools where parents have got a lot of money safety from meeting somebody you don’t want them to meet maybe fear what is it what is it that’s going
On you can feel it I can say it to you cuz you’re you’re an older I don’t know you might get upset but you’re an older CR I could not say this to an audience 10 years younger than me because it’s too knitbone in this city it affects where people live what they
Do and and I think that’s the saddest thing you know in that there is this fear of other people in a city who’ve absolutely had no need to have this fear of other people um it’s not the Bry head R visited time and the men have just turned up from the Welsh
Coal Fields kind of difference anymore good things happening I promise you positive um I quite like the traffic schemes at least we’re doing them uh I like uh the cycle paths that have been painted on Pavements you take them for granted they were new um we could do a bit more than that
But it’s kind of like better uh than nothing what I’ve learned to like in 10 years or become a lot less chippy about is I quite like the new people moving in I like the Americans who live in Florence Park now with their guitars you can find them in the pub
Some of you may know who they are creating new communities trying to create a social life tomorrow night I’m a meeting about why of the 61 University towns in England does Oxford rank 61st for worst nighlife somebody has to okay but anyway and that’s the Americans want an answer to
That right and in a way these new communities coming in by Community I mean people who just hopefully stay for 10 years it’s just like what has always happened in Oxford it’s always been migrants coming in that’s what the car town is about um so that is good there are other there
Are other good things happening but there is this wish not to alter anything um that it’s harder and harder to defend when what you have is not NE necessarily that precious anymore it looks lovely you don’t want to spoil views and things particularly when your main
Asset is that in the Europe where the rest of Europe is getting remarkably richer compared to us we’re a cheap tourist destination you might not like them um but they are money you don’t want to spoil you don’t want to spoil the views but this is the largest town
Between London and Birmingham and is Tiny and this has been constrained in a particular way I think for the fantasies of a series of senior ministers government ministers Prime Ministers and permanent secretaries who the rudest way I put it let’s do it I’ll get off because they all lost their virginity
Here which is why it mustn’t ever change no so did I okay I won’t tell you where it was in Oxford but that doesn’t mean that that particular spot of South Parks need anyway I’ll shut up uh please ask me questions please keep them short we’re
Going to have a compare and I’ll keep my answer short