246 NOTEWORTHY TREES 



THE HIGH STREET 



Between St. Mary's and Magdalen Bridge were formerly many 

 small picturesque gabled houses and almost every one had 

 its little garden. But owing to the extension of the College 

 and University buildings, and to the growth of the sordid 

 spirit of commercialism, the amenities of the High as a resi- 

 dential street and the number of trees growing there have 

 both diminished. A beautiful tree is of less commercial value 

 to a shopkeeper than a shanty in a back-yard. Time was, 

 when an impressionist described Oxford as rising " from groves 

 which hide all buildings but such as are consecrated to some 

 wise and holy purpose " ; but the continued depopulation of 

 the centre of the city and the spreading of the "ugly, 

 irrelevant suburbs," by St. John's and other Colleges has, 

 in a very few years, changed the city for the worse. 



An instance of this kind of perversion occurred only a few 

 years ago, when the charming and unique old-world garden 

 of the Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, reaching along the 

 backs of the High Street houses, between grey stone walls to 

 where the old city wall * peeped out between wreaths of ivy, 

 was sacrificed, together with the gardens of several houses 

 adjoining, to the erection of a great schola orgiorum, horrid 

 to look upon from without, and dubious from within. An 

 even more remarkable sign of the times is that it is held in 

 some quarters that those should be held in highest honour 



* This large piece of the fine old city wall was pulled down by a 

 College that, only a few years previously, had by its agents wantonly de- 

 molished another and longer piece at the back of some unnecessary and 

 badly-planned houses in King Street. Such a deplorable act of vandalism 

 has been excused by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher in 1907 as follows : "Even 

 while I write, I learn that the Bursar of one of the leading colleges has 

 ordered the destruction of a piece of the old city wall ; when remonstrated 

 with, he replied : i. that it was a very old wall ; ii. that it was very much 

 in the way ; Hi. that there was plenty of it left." I am indebted to G. E. B. 

 for the reference to this note to Fletcher's " History of England," vol. ii. 

 P- 378. 



