TRAVEL -- OXFORD

FEW images of Britain are quite as distinctive as the dreaming spires of the Oxford skyline; few cities are more often visited and more nostalgically remembered, and few are more connected with the world of books. Yet little of the love and attention lavished on Oxford trickles down the Cowley Road, which starts on the wrong side of the Cherwell river, and winds up in the grungy industrial district that for decades epitomised Britain's inefficient and stroppy motor industry.
Indeed, the Cowley Road seems at first sight not just unloved, but outright unlovable. It has no glorious medieval buildings, their golden stone soaked with centuries of scholarship. C.S. Lewis did not drink there. John Ruskin did not draw it. J.R.R. Tolkien did not fantasise about it, nor did Lewis Carroll take any boating parties of little girls there. Even by the standards of the suburbs, it is unglamorous: north Oxford's glorious red-brick town-houses inspired John Betjeman, the former poet laureate. It is hard to imagine even a limerick being written about the scrappy shops and tatty houses that lie to Oxford's east.
Yet James Attlee's scholarly, reflective and sympathetic journey up the Cowley Road is one of the best travel books that has been written about Britain's oldest university city. It is not—at least not directly—the Oxford of punts and gowns. His raw material is diversity: the Cowley Road as a corner of the outside world, where change and excitement are squeezed into the cramped hinterland of the scholarly theme park of the city centre.
Among his neighbours are “Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Indian, Polish, Kurdish, Chinese, French, Italian, Thai, Japanese and African restaurants”. And that is not all: “sari shops, cafés, fast-food outlets, electronics stores, a florist, a Ghanaian fishmonger, pubs, bars, three live-music venues, tattoo parlours, betting shops, a Russian supermarket, a community centre, a publisher, the headquarters of an international NGO, musical-instrument vendors, butchers (halal and otherwise), three cycle shops, two video-rental stores, post offices, two mosques, three churches, a Chinese herbalist [and] a pawn shop” all sit side-by-side with “a police station, two record shops, two centres of alternative medicine, a 24-hour Tesco, an independent cinema, call centres, three sex shops, numerous grocers, letting agencies, a bingo hall, and a lap-dancing establishment that plies its trade on Sundays.”
“Why”, he asks, “make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?”