Three traffic wardens for one car

I watched a pack of traffic wardens surround a car in Market Street, Oxford this afternoon. I guess only one gets the bonus and perhaps they had all raced to get there, the fastest getting to do the job while the others stood around and chatted.

Or perhaps it really does take three of them – one to do the reedin, one for the ritin and one to operate the camera, with the reward money divvied up between them.

Oriel Square put out to grass

A quarter of a century or so ago, I visited Ostia Antica, the long-abandoned port outside Rome. Now, I expect, it has a visitor centre, lavatories and car parks, and all the shoddy gloss which bureaucrats and tourist boards throw up to make everywhere look the same as they dig their snouts into the heritage trough.

Then it was just a few old buildings in a field, the plots and streets clearly delineated, evoking a clear picture of how it used to be and how far it had fallen, the grass pushing up through the old stones redolent of a lost civilisation.

You get much the same feeling of lost civilisation in Oriel Square now. The square is ruined anyway by the ugly monuments beloved of uncultured bureaucrats, in this case the bollards and other street furniture erected by the insensate oafs of Oxfordshire County Council’s highways department (see What a load of bollards in Oriel Square), an act of vandalism by people too thick to understand what they are ruining.

Welcome to Summertown

There used to be a notice at each end of Summertown saying “Welcome to Summertown”. There were various reasons for disliking these, apart from the vulgarity of that superfluous “Welcome to” – for a start, it doubled the amount of metalwork in a road already full of silly little signs.

The main reason, though was the mismatch between the proclaimed welcome and the reality. Here, for example is what you find if you actually try and visit Summertown.

Capital ignorance at the Plain

My post Gents in St Giles Oxford referred in passing to “the screaming capitals so beloved of officious plonkers in council offices” – the habit of council pen-pushers of beginning words with Capital Letters to Emphasise their Importance. In that case, the capitalisation was the least part of the offensive ignorance shown in the notice in question.

Here is one where the capitals – and the lack of them – is the main point.

Signs obscuring the sights of Oxford

The photograph shows the Clarendon Building in Oxford, a fine stone building erected in 1711-1713 to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor was responsible for the towers of All Souls, for the front to Westminster Abbey, for some beautiful East London churches and for finishing off Blenheim Palace.

It is beautiful. It is important for itself, for its architect and for the man after whom it was named, Lord Clarendon, whose History of the Great Rebellion partly paid for it.

To the thick oaf in charge of signage and street furniture in central Oxford , it is just a building, a pile of old stone. He has split the view of its facade with a tall pole adorned with big bright signs.The really obtrusive one, the big blue cycle route sign pointing to the left, is new.

Gents in St Giles Oxford

This group of notices was photographed on Saturday 3 February on the railings of the lavatories at the south end of St Giles in Oxford. I glimpsed the white one a few days ago and went back to photograph it – it illustrates my general theme that the sort of people who run local government, here at least, are not fit custodians of beautiful places and things.

Plastic Bags from Oxford shops

What ideas do you have for making Oxford a better place to shop?

I got a Comment from a man who had visited Oxford today and been impressed by the fact that the book and music shops (he named Blackwells particularly) did not assume that he wanted his purchases put into a plastic bag – indeed, assumed the opposite.

At first sight this seemed a bit off-subject, as my correspondent acknowledged. Our role here is to show you the attractions of Oxford and to castigate the authorities when their actions (or lack of them) threaten the fabric or the feel of the place.