B U R N

A walk in the countryside - the day spring came to the shire.

Copycat? Check the itinerary here (pdf).

Due to unspecified intricacies of funding and research policy, my academic home turf - aka the institute formerly known as the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization (JMI) - is changing its name to the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (what can I say, they like simple names around here). We will mark the day on March 16th with an open event entitled “Can we steer social and technological innovation?”

I am not sure whether it is a good or a bad sign, but it means that the JMI, in one way or the other, started and ended with me! It has certainly been an important epoch in my life.

In other news, I was a bit sad to learn that Bent Flyvbjerg, one of the few world-class social scientific scholars ever to come out of Denmark, will join SBS exactly as I leave the building; officially, I stop being a DPhil candidate on March 31st whereas he will take up his chair on April 1st. Talk about sliding doors…

I am planning to write a New Yorker-style article on the construction of St. Catherine’s College and need your help.

Most of the people who knew Jacobsen and worked with him during the construction will not be around for that much longer, yet I feel there is a need to articulate some of the untold stories about the initial phase and the socio-material developments since then.

I know very few good ‘accounts’ of buildings or sites but have had a couple of recommendations so far:

Pretty much anything by John Betjeman (books – including the Shell County series - and TV programmes – some of the latter may be available on DVD). He was a real English eccentric with a particular love of Victorian buildings and railways – which came together in his campaign to prevent the demolition of St Pancras (there is a statue of him in the new Eurostar station). His gift was, I think, to communicate his passion for the subject and he wasn’t afraid to be critical. He also founded the Private Eye column that highlighted how our traditional and beautiful buildings were being demolished/desecrated to feed the modernistic tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s.  

One of my favourite books – for obvious reasons – is Christopher (who died very recently) and Edward Hibbert’s Encyclopedia of Oxford. It covers the architecture of the various colleges (and other buildings) and does a good job of explaining how and why things were built.

Can you think of any other sources of inspiration; fiction, factual, written, on screen, online? - any help appreciated.

It is normally quite a delight to step out of the train at Paddington and enjoy the kind of splendour that can only be afforded by a grand railway station. This morning, however, there was something eerie about the light; it appeared more like a tunnel than the usual cathedral of old-style grandeur and mobility.

Hyde Park, on the other hand, presented itself as an all-encompassing source of white, interrupted only by the occasional fellow human being or companion species. A nice but demanding bike ride indeed.

On Trafalgar Square, the Admiral stood in his usual place, silently watching the crowds passing by. When I finally reached the office, I was one of the few people actually turning up. My otherwise reliable colleagues P. honeline and Int Ernet even decided to take the day off so I embarked on the return leg right away.

Sometimes the journey is the destination.

Update: Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece on the ‘day of innocence‘ in the Guardian:

In London, this doesn’t happen often. We trust our dour reflexive, self-poisoning moaning as a lifestyle philosophy instead. We like it that way: strangers are strange and Britain, damn everything about it, doesn’t work. Why don’t the buses run on time? Why are we so hopeless? Why can’t something be done (usually by someone else who we can blame for their shortcomings)? And this chorus of self-immolation is taken up countrywide: why, non-Londoners ask, is the capital brought to a standstill by a little snow? Why can’t you southern ponces get your act together? And the cry is international too: as I walk through the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, a French couple consulting the warnings about the tube, roll their eyes as one. He said: “Typiquement anglais. Rien ne va plus!” They both laugh, as if to say their Gallic expectations had been confirmed.