View of the Radcliffe Observatory from inside the new Mathematical Institute

We ate our breakfasts at a table on the High Street, while there thundered past us the desperate traffic maelstrom that is the usual morning condition of Oxford. As I sat there rather despondent, I chanced to notice, between passing vehicles, the entrance to Catte Street on the other side of the High. Just for a moment I glimpsed over there, as in a vision, the Oxford dream of tradition, made manifest in stately golden stone, domed, spired, pinnacled and rectangled in timeless calm and assurance. It was, I thought just for that moment, the true presence of my dear old alma mater.

Of course it wasn’t. In an instant the illusion was shattered, by the screaming siren of an ambulance and the passing of another few hundred cars, and I was obliged to recognise again an Oxford university truth: that this most complex and fascinating of institutions has almost always been in a state of flux, if not of conflict. Over the centuries there has inevitably been friction between the influential concourse of colleges that is the university, and the old provincial town that was always its host, and is now a jam-packed industrial and commercial city.....Continue Reading

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