Oxfordshire Culture mafia

[IdleRich]

the pride people have about coming from e.g. Yorkshire or Cornwall or London etc. is totally foreign to me.

No one is proud of coming from Oxford, but some are proud of going to there.

 

[Leo]

how did you end up in Wales, @craner?

 

[craner]

how did you end up in Wales, @craner?

My mother and her family are from Neath. My parents divorced when I was 4 so she moved us to Swansea. But for that, I would have grown up in Shrewsbury.

 

[Corpsey]

"In the 2016 European Union referendum, Oxfordshire was the only English county as a whole to vote to remain in the European Union by a significant margin, at 57.06% (70.27% in the City of Oxford), despite Cherwell (barely) voting to leave at 50.31%.[citation needed]"

😎

 

[shiels]

Why do southern english people always dodge buying rounds? I'm owed approximately 400 pints by southern english colleagues

 

[Mr. Tea]

No one is proud of coming from Oxford, but some are proud of going to there.

My wife is definitely proud of having goed to the Oxford.

 

[shakahislop]

it's hard to think of a cultural movement that's had much to do with oxfordshire. the fake chipping norton thing is interesting actually. in that in the same way that people want to believe that there is such a thing as dimes square and the brooklyn culture mafia, people (the newspapers and their readers) also want to believe that there's something called 'the chipping norton set'. it seems like a similar impulse, to fantasise about all these people getting together and being mates, and linking it to a particular geography. there are earlier examples of the same thing in literary circles: the bloomsbury set. everyone rocking up in tangiers. all the americans in paris. the lineage broadly seems to go literature - music - and now online ephemera.

 

[shakahislop]

Re: political mafia: I remember visiting my friends in Oxford not long ago and going on a walk down the river near their house, a beautiful summer day, and being surrounded by these picture postcard buildings, canal boats, all that jazz ('far from the madding crowd') and thinking that if you grew up in this sort of luxury it would be easy to think that there's really nothing wrong with the country/world as it is, everything is tickety boo as far as you're concerned, let's just keep things like this...

yeah dead on. oxford (which is a totally distinct thing from oxfordshire i think) is a pretty segregated city in general. i met an indonesian girl recently who had hardly crossed magdelen brige. a load of the students seem to hardly leave the university part of the city. my mates on the other hand pretty much don't leave east oxford to go into the centre. there are other divisions as well. cornmarket is a crash zone between the youth of the global elite and people from the countryside coming in to go to the shops. two worlds colliding.

 

[william_kent]

it's hard to think of a cultural movement that's had much to do with oxfordshire

there was the "inklings", although maybe only two of them made an impact on popular culture

 

[shakahislop]

north oxfordshire and south oxfordshire are such different things. one is a set of hills and money seeping out of the university and london. the other is an agricultural plain with agricultural roots. people speaking with something close to a somerset accent.

 

[shakahislop]

big council estates in every village. 100% sold off. not one left in public hands. you can tell by the construction and the massive gardens. a layer of history. they cost 400k now. a type of person is dying off, other types of people are being created in their place. all these rural people whose house has earned more then they have. living inside a small fortune that can only be cashed in if they move two hundred miles away from home. the pubs are almost all gone, there are more and more coffee shops instead.

 

[IdleRich]

there was the "inklings", although maybe only two of them made an impact on popular culture

I was just about to mention that. I guess they fit perfectly as a) they were a real literary group of this kind who (unusually?) actually did meet up in pubs in the way that outsiders envisage and b) they were based in Oxford

 

[Leo]

north oxfordshire and south oxfordshire are such different things. one is a set of hills and money seeping out of the university and london. the other is an agricultural plain with agricultural roots. people speaking with something close to a somerset accent.

kinda like Brooklyn heights and sheepshead bay.

they cost 400k now.

funny/sad to think you can't buy a decent-size one-bedroom apartment here for that.

 

[shakahislop]

kinda like Brooklyn heights and sheepshead bay.

yeah. actually one thing i've noticed that i don't think gets remarked on much is the geographical pattern you get in cities, where you have rich parts of town and poor parts of town, is replicated in oxfordshire. its just you have rich villages and poor villages instead of rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. or at least, that's how it was. the housing issue is changing everything a lot i think.

 

[IdleRich]

north oxfordshire and south oxfordshire are such different things. one is a set of hills and money seeping out of the university and london. the other is an agricultural plain with agricultural roots. people speaking with something close to a somerset accent.

Yeah, the accent where I grew up - and I think in all the that side of Oxford - is kinda like a rough west country one. Unsurprisingly I suppose. I've said it before, but if you've ever seen This Country then you've pretty much seen where I grew up - it's exactly the same, right down to unemployed over grown children in Swindon tops listlessly hanging around the tatty playground. There is one bit in that where some older bloke is trying to impress the teenagers by telling utterly transparent lies about knobbing the barmaid from the local pub, a scene that played itself out countless times before my disbelieving eyes. I was naive but not totally fucking stupid.

 

[shakahislop]

the uk collective imagination has two categories of poor people, the hearty ex-industrial and the city. its so contrary to our experiences but that's what's represented.

 

[IdleRich]

The Eagle and Child pub (commonly known as the Bird and Baby or simply just the Bird) in Oxford where the Inklings met informally on Tuesday mornings during term.

Not a bad pub - though I think it was known as The Bird and Bastard contrary to the claim above.

 

[version]

it's hard to think of a cultural movement that's had much to do with oxfordshire. the fake chipping norton thing is interesting actually. in that in the same way that people want to believe that there is such a thing as dimes square and the brooklyn culture mafia, people (the newspapers and their readers) also want to believe that there's something called 'the chipping norton set'. it seems like a similar impulse, to fantasise about all these people getting together and being mates, and linking it to a particular geography. there are earlier examples of the same thing in literary circles: the bloomsbury set. everyone rocking up in tangiers. all the americans in paris. the lineage broadly seems to go literature - music - and now online ephemera.

The Primrose Hill set was a 90s tabloid one: Kate Moss, Jude Law, the Gallaghers, Patsy Kensit and a bunch of others.

 

[william_kent]

it could be argued that the inklings ( and by association, Oxfordshire ) have had more of an effect on modern culture than the Bloomsbury set or some other artsy fartsy London clique - I doubt film adaptations of Virginia Woolfe have been watched as by many people as the Hobbit / LOTR or even the various Lion, Witch and Wardrobe TV programmes...

 

[Mr. Tea]

it's hard to think of a cultural movement that's had much to do with oxfordshire. the fake chipping norton thing is interesting actually. in that in the same way that people want to believe that there is such a thing as dimes square and the brooklyn culture mafia, people (the newspapers and their readers) also want to believe that there's something called 'the chipping norton set'. it seems like a similar impulse, to fantasise about all these people getting together and being mates, and linking it to a particular geography. there are earlier examples of the same thing in literary circles: the bloomsbury set. everyone rocking up in tangiers. all the americans in paris. the lineage broadly seems to go literature - music - and now online ephemera.

OTOH, the Camerons, Rebekah Brooks, Jeremy Clarkson and that guy from Blur who now runs a food festival all do actually live there, or pretty nearby, which surely qualifies the place as a good candidate for some kind of tactical nuclear strike.