Annie Skinner, The Cowley Road: A History
David Renton
More than any other British town of its size, Oxford has been home to
campaigns and social movements. When 150 years ago Newman's high church
followers felt unease with Anglicanism, they took the name the Oxford
Movement. Among Newman's descendants there were a number of Christian
Socialists, including the red Vicar Conrad Noel, and the future Trotskyist
Reg Groves. To this day, Oxford provides bases for the Green Party and the
Independent Working Class Alliance.
When modern movements have begun, in Oxford, it has almost always been along
Cowley Road. At the west end, the road holds private schools, Magdalen and
St. Hilda's Colleges. At its east, the road leads directly to the estate of
Blackbird Leys. It gives a home to the people who have worked at the Cowley
car plant, or more recently the post-workers who have led several national
disputes.
For any activist who has
lived in Oxford, Annie Skinner's book should bring back memories: of strikes
at the car plants in the 1970s, and the 'Cowley wives' who opposed the
strikers, supported by the national press, Close Down Campsfield, long
meetings at the East Oxford Community Centre, the Oxford Committee for
Racial Integration, Uhuru, the poll tax campaigns, the Campaign Against the
Criminal Justice Bill, the battle to save the Ultimate Picture Palace (when
the police fought
back anarchists, armed, they claimed, with didgeridoos), council strikes,
women's liberation, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. All are recorded
here, with the proper historian's attitudes of sympathy and respect.
For years, academic
historians have been turning their back on the study of grand political
processes, to concentrate on the micro-history of local lives. They are not
creating fashion, but chasing it: a deeper movement exists taking in local
and family history, heritage and other grassroots movements so that people
can take a pride in their region, their place. The left contributes, of
course, as the list above shows. But we never seem to acknowledge what we're
doing. Instead, our campaigns takes on restless names: if a hypothetical
socialist party had branches in Oxford, what would they be called? 'Oxford
East' and 'West' (bureaucratic)? Or 'Cowley Road' (resonant with people's
own sense of place)? I'd recommend Annie Skinner's book: people should read
it; but most important all of us should build the movements on which such
local histories are based.