Shark
Neighbours complained about the shabby state of the shark house, but the shark itself was still exciting worldwide interest, with he shark page on this site receiving over two hundred visits a week from all over the world, mostly via search engines.
In June 2003 Granada Television filmed a programme about the shark for the Discovery Channel’s series The World’s Most Bizarre Buildings, interviewing both the pro- and anti-shark brigades. |
Manor Ground development
The building of the Manor Hospital on the cleared Manor Ground continued throughout 2003.
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Cuckoo Lane monument
A stone was placed in Cuckoo Lane, just to the west of Headley Way, in 2003. It reads: “Cuckoo Lane. This stone was dedicated on 4th May 2003 in memory of Marjorie and Stanley Harris.” Some local people felt that it resembled a tombstone and was out of place here. The stone was commissioned by Ruth Harris of Brackley from the Stile Company. Highway officers allowed it to be erected on the grounds that it is a street sign, which does not require planning permission; but in future such unusual road signs proposed for Oxford will have to go through the planning procedure
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Headington Quarry Post Office
The consultation period ended, and the post office will close. Headington Post Office on London Road will be improved to cater for the extra customers, with an additional counter being installed and increased opening hours. The same services will continue, with the addition of motor vehicle licence facilities and the exclusion of lottery.
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New Park & Ride to Churchill
A new Park & Ride service now runs from Thornhill Park & Ride to the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Windmill Road, and then through the hospital site to the Churchill Hospital. Staff are to be banned from parking at the Churchill if they live near the M40 and are thus able to use this service; but some have threatened to resign.
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Bazaar opened by Paxman
Jeremy Paxman opened All Saints bazaar in Church House, New High Street on Saturday 29 November 2003: see picture. The bazaar raised £1,600 for the Children’s Society.
On its gift day in November, All Saints Church raised the record sum of £23,000. |
Headington mugger sentenced
Ian Sleight was sentenced to five years in prison for the following robberies on vulnerable people in Headington:
- 16 June: stealing the handbag from an 82-year-old lady in Cuckoo Lane (her hip was broken in the attack)
- 20 June: stealing a wallet from a 79-year-old man in Latimer Road
- 22 June: attempting to steal the handbag of an 83-year-old woman in London Road
Sleight, aged 41, had been a drug addict for 25 years. He was homeless and lived under a bridge in Blackbird Leys, but sometimes stayed at an address in Headington.
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Diabetes Centre
Headington acquired another new medical department in 2003: the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolism (OCDEM). |
Charity shop break-in
Thieves broke into the Marie Curie Cancer Care shop on the London Road through a rear widow and stole about £250 from a locked filing cabinet on the night of Tuesday 4 November 2003.
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New centre opened
Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles opened the Botnar Research Centre at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre on 22 October 2003. |
Brookes buys Milham Ford School
Oxford Brookes University purchased the Milham Ford School site in 2003 for its School of Health and Social Care.
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Speeding driver banned
James Morrelli of Coniston Avenue and a graduate of Oxford Brookes University was banned from driving for one year for reaching speeds of over 80mph down Headington Hill at 8.46am on 11 August 2003. |
Mobile phone mast
Headington Telephone Exchange (in front of the Manor Ground) was granted planning permission to erect new telecommunications equipment on its roof on behalf of Hutchison 3G. The mast is quite small and only covers the area from Old Headington to Old Road. Similar masts will be sited elsewhere in Oxford to prepare the city for the new “Three” range of mobile phones with pictures.
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£5,000 stolen from newsagent
A thief stole a bag containing £5,000 from the manager of Balfour News in Windmill Road as she was taking the money to Headington Post Office at about 9.25am on Monday 27 October. The theft took place on the corner of Holyoake Road and the bag was found empty in Bury Knowle Park. |
Councillor on the run
Stephen Tall, councillor for Headington ward, completed the Blenheim 10km charity run in aid of the Oxford Children’s Hospital on Sunday 19 October 2003 in 49 mins 3 secs. |
Ghost report
The report of the investigation into the ghosts at the White Hart in Old Headington gets the facts about the pub are all wrong (it was never a coaching inn, and it was built in the sixteenth century)….
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Headington shops
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Cricket ground, Barton Road
A planning application for the erection of 40 dwellings on the cricket ground in Barton Road was rejected by the City Council’s Strategic Development Control Committee in 2003. Another major sporting facility in Cowley was dependent on the development of this site, which is worth £2million.
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Headington Community Centre
Firefighters with breathing apparatus tacked a fire at the community centre in Gladstone Road on Sunday 6 April. A burning object is believed to have been put through the letterbox, and an office and the roof were damaged.
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Headington accident caused by vandals
Vandals kicked in the control box that operates the traffic lights in central Headington on the night of Wednesday 1 January, and at 4.15 in the morning two cars collided at the junction of Windmill and London Road.
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School name controversy
Barton Village First School is moving to the Bayswater Middle School site in September when it becomes a primary school. Barton Community Association think that Barton should remain part of the name, but the head teacher is adamant that it should be Bayards Hill Primary. This name is not known by local historians, but the Roman road from Dorchester to Alchester did indeed run just to the east of Bayswater Road.
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Thornhill Park & Ride
With 27 attacks on cars in the first two months of 2003, people were advised not to leave their cars overnight in the Thornhill Park & Ride carpark.
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Local Plan
The deposit period for the second draft of the Oxford Local Plan 2001–2016 ended on Friday 4 April 2003. Changes made since the last draft include the addition of DS69A (Ruskin Hall site) and more definite proposals for cycle routes from Northway to Pullen’s Lane and Downside Road to Windmill Road.
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Hill Top House
The application to build five mews houses in the garden of Hill Top House, a listed building at the top of Headington Hill, was approved by the full city council on 17 February 2003 after being called in. The voting was close (16 for and 16 against), and the Lord Mayor’s casting vote decided the matter. The houses are now in the process of being built and can be seen from the road
Background: In January 2001 Oxford city council granted planning permission for a similar earlier application, but on 27 June 2002 Martin Young (Chairman of Headington Hill Residents’ Association) successfully challenged in the Appeal Court plans for five new houses in the garden, on the grounds that the council had failed to consider a policy statement by English Heritage. |
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Burglars in Stile Road
Three burglars tricked their way into the home of two sisters aged 89 and 91 in Stile Road around 10pm on Monday 22 December 2003 by pretending to be police officers, and stole up to £400.
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Cheney gets specialist status
Cheney School was one of four Oxfordshire schools in 2003 to be awarded specialist status by the Government, which means up to £750,000 in extra funding over four years. The school, which has more than 200 bilingual students, was awarded the status in Languages. |
Thornhill Park & Ride
The Thornhill Park & Ride was extended and now has 950 spaces.
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Letters in Oxford Mail
A Headington correspondent had the following letters relating to local issues published:
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Local Shop News
Vente Tsunami is the exotic new name for Styles Hairdressing in Windmill Road
Somerfield: Sunday opening hours have been changed to 11am to 5pm (except for Easter Sunday, when like the other main local supermarkets it will be closed).
Cancer Research UK shops The one near Oxfam has had a refit, while the other (between Abbey National and the Trade Exchange) is now a specialist secondhand record and book shop.
Top to Tail, 4D New High Street: The application for change of use from dog-grooming parlour (Class A1) to estate agency/ financial services (Class A2) was approved. (The shop is outside the boundary of the Headington District Shopping Centre.)
Spiers Blake An application for the change of use of the upstairs offices at 95 London Road to a dental surgery has also been allowed.
Daly’s Butchers was demolished and will be rebuilt. A second planning application was submitted for the site, for a shop with offices above |
Pubs news
- The White Hart in St Andrew’s Road had a refit in 2003. It was taken over by Linda Vinall and Dick Underwood.
- The Britannia reopened as a pub-restaurant in July 2003 . It is now part of the Mitchell’s & Butler Ember Inn chain.
- Morrells Brewery is planning to demolish The Fox in Barton and build a new pub and housing on the 0.9 acre site:
Oxford Mail, 7 May 2003:
“Pub plan divides community”
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It’s the Manor Hospital
The new hospital on the Manor Ground site will be called the Manor Hospital, following pressure from the Oxford Mail. The original name chosen, the Nuffield Hospital Acland, was felt to be too confusing.
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Cars set on fire
The Slade Fire Station in Headington dealt with 117 arson attacks on cars in year to June 2003.
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Escaped prisoner
Kenneth Wilson, sent to prison for 18 years in 1994 for robbery with violence, escaped while receiving treatment at the John Radcliffe Hospital on Thursday 26 June, but gave himself up in Humberside the next day. The Home Office is to hold an enquiry into how he escaped from his two guards.
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Ruskin Hall
In 2003 Ruskin College was planning to move to part of the former Unipart site on the Woodstock Road, but their deal with Berkeley Homes fell through. They were planning to sell their buildings and land in both central Oxford and in Headington to fund the move. According to the Guardian, they hoped to get £6m–£12m for their main Headington site and £1–£2m for their smaller one on the opposite side of Stoke Place.
Background
Ruskin College, whose main building is in central Oxford, has in addition occupied the former Rookery in Old Headington since 1946, and Stoke House on the other side of Stoke Place since 1965. The 20-acre site includes a large orchard, woodland, and fields down as far as the northern bypass, and was taken into the Old Headington Conservation Area in December 1998, and every tree there has a Tree Preservation Order.
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Crime in Headington shopping area
On Sunday 9 March 2003 a robber fled from Thresher’s in Old High Street at 12.40pm with only £60 after threatening the female assistant (a Brookes student) with a handgun.
On Friday 14 March at 8.20pm a teenager went into Posh Fish on London Road and snatched the whole till, driving off in a red vehicle. On the same evening at about 9 p.m. youths stoned buses as they passed along London Road, and later that night a brick was thrown through the window of the Coventry Building Society/
On Saturday 15 March at 2am a robber threatened a female assistant with a gun in Budgens Express and got away with a three-figure sum: Three youths, two aged 17 and one aged 16, have been arrested for the offence.
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Latimer Road
At an area committee meeting on 20 May 2003, plans to build a second house in the garden of 40 Latimer Road (facing on to All Saints Road) were approved. |
Latimer Road flats
In 2003 the North-East Area Committee approved a new application to replace 18 and 22 Latimer Road with five flats and nine houses (with 19 parking spaces). Two conditions were placed on the development: (1) The central house in the rear block to be deleted; and (2) all drainage and sewerage issues relating to the site to be resolved before any development is permitted. A new plan for thirteen dwellings has now been submitted. |
Shotgun deaths in Risinghurst
At 3pm on Friday 4 April 2003 a man and a woman, both aged 33, were killed by shotgun wounds in Kiln Lane, Risinghurst. It is believed that the man fired three shots at his wife in front of their 3-year-old and 18-month-old sons and then killed himself.
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Stephen Road bones
The bones discovered on the building site in Stephen Road on Saturday 30 November have turned out to be older than was thought. Oxford Archaeology has identified them as belonging to an adult Anglo-Saxon female who lived during the fifth or sixth century AD. She was buried with a necklace, two brooches, a copper alloy pin, and an iron knife. These are the only Anglo-Saxon remains to be found in this area, and will probably go to a museum. The police were initially called to the site in the centre of Headington, where Scott Fraser Ltd are building 14 flats.
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20 Beech Road
Councillors at the area committee meeting on 24 June 2003 voted to approve the erection of eleven flats |
SANE Research Centre opens
Prince Charles opened the SANE Research Centre at the Warneford Hospital on 5 February 2003
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Oxford Cancer Centre
Outline planning permission was granted at the area committee meeting on 20 May 2003 to demolish Ritchie Russell House and erect two new buildings to form the Oxford Cancer Centre at the Churchill Hospital. |
Crossing for Headley Way
Following public pressure by Sybil Sheringham Dibdin, the county council decided to site a pedestrian crossing on Headley Way near Cuckoo Lane.
Background: Emma Dibdin, 14, of Staunton Road was hit by a car as she crossed Headley Way on her way to Headington School, prompting a demand for new pedestrian crossings before those planned for 2004. Emma is the daughter of the well-known author Michael Dibdin, formerly of Oxford and now living in Seattle.
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