Tag Archives: Oxfordshire

Apr 03 2025
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Brize Norton: the non-military bit

Wednesday 2nd April 2025, 5.20pm (day 4,969)

Brize Norton village, 2/4/25

As I type this on Thursday morning, my latest journey has ended, and so for the next nine days you will be seeing pictures of a lump of volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This will be a quite different environment from the genteel acres of Oxfordshire, the part of England that I had to transit through to reach my destination, seeing as I was flying out of RAF Brize Norton overnight. That being a military base, they were understandably touchy about deadbeat civilians like me coming in and happily snapping away at their installations for blogging purposes.

Here, instead, is the village of Brize Norton itself: a patch of quintessential Oxfordshire. With that thatched roof, I guess this scene might have looked much the same for two or three hundred years. Except for the one anachronism — it’s there, if you can spot it.

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Jul 17 2021
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

St. Mary’s Church, Banbury

Friday 16th July 2021, 11.40am (day 3,613)

St Mary's Church, Banbury, 16/7/21

The ‘Strategy Forum’ came and went — nice to meet people again, not so nice to be presented with visions of the future ruled by metrics and process management, with scholarship now an apparent inconvenience, allowed for grudgingly if at all. I couldn’t make it even to the end of the last half-day so escaped about 11am and shortly afterwards was in Banbury, which can become the 349th different location to feature on the blog. St. Mary’s Church is one of those buildings that it’s very difficult to get a full impression of on a single photo, but here’s my best attempt.

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Jul 15 2021
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Education Strategy Forum, Heythrop Park

Thursday 15th July 2021, 4.40pm (day 3,612)

Heythrop Park, 15/7/21

The house of Heythrop Park is 300 years old, and built for the first Duke of Shrewsbury (not that we are very near Shrewsbury here). 300 years ago, they clearly believed in symmetry. And I’m quite fond of the principle myself, if truth be told; enough to get annoyed at not only those people who left the spare picnic table out, but who couldn’t co-ordinate the curtains on each side of the facade. The guy taking a break from the conference? Well, he’s just unplanned humanity. Him, I excuse.

I’ve been here before by the way: first visting (for the same conference, or rather ‘strategy forum’) in February 2018.

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Feb 08 2018
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

By the croquet lawns

Wednesday 7th February 2018, 10.45am (day 2,358)

Heythrop walker, 7/2/18

Heythrop Park was built three hundred years ago, more or less. In its heyday doubtless it was a sumptuous retreat from the pressures of the outside world, where paid labour served the privileged few, who were repaid in  enhanced status and social cachet.

It is of course much the same now. But we call these gatherings ‘conferences’ and we all mingle to talk ‘best practice’ and ‘strategy’ rather than shoot pheasants. Ah, what the hell, it’s actually been a pretty interesting day and a half. Nice building too (the original manor house anyway: perhaps not the modern hotel extension).

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Feb 07 2018
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Daily Post, Landscape

Morning frost, Heythrop Park

Tuesday 6th February 2018, 8.05am (day 2,357)

Heythrop Park, 6/2/18

Somewhat shamefully this is the earliest picture in a given day since late November. But it’s only now that the light is starting to return to the sky at a civilised hour in the morning. I said there would be some Oxfordshire countryside today, so here it is — the grounds of Heythrop Park, once the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury, then a Jesuit college, now a hotel of the sort where conferences are held, like the one I am attending.

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