Abstract
This chapter considers the histories of planning and urban infrastructure in the city of Oxford by looking at the media baron Robert Maxwell’s life in the city and his ownership of Oxford United Football Club. I explore the role of the football club in the changing urban landscape of the city as a way of thinking about the way civic institutions—sporting or cultural—impact upon urban life and a sense of regional identity. Maxwell wanted to merge Oxford United with Reading, to form a conglomerate club: the ‘Thames Valley Royals’. This project and its frustration and failure form the spine of this chapter’s narrative.
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Notes
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McKibbin (1998: 339–350) gives a useful summary of the social profile of football, its relation to the industrial working class, and the origins of the professional game in ‘football’s traditional heartland in the North and the industrial Midlands’ (341). I describe the football club as a useful, but ‘circumscribed’ lens because it could not be said represent the totality of a community, or its interests. For example, through much of the twentieth century, professional players in England were exclusively male and their spectators predominantly so.
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Greenhalgh and Kilminster (1993) describe the ‘severe contraction’ in the British automotive industry, and the attendant ‘massive job losses’ in this period. They show that between 1970 and 1989, Britain’s ‘surplus on the balance of payments of over £4 billion in motor vehicles trade […] had become a deficit of £6.6 billion’ (34).
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The story of the announcement, and the ensuing protests, is told in Hassan (2013).
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Harvey also emphasises the tensions between Oxford and the ‘greenfield non-union site in Swindon’ (2016: 215: 218).
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The Oxford-Swindon rivalry is slyly alluded to in the Oxford-based author Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is set in Swindon. ‘We’ve got to get out of this town, kiddo’ the narrator’s father is prone to repeat—‘Swindon is the arsehole of the world’ (Haddon 2003: 58).
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Davenport-Hines claims that ‘banks that had taken security for loans in the form of shares lost over £655 million’ from Maxwell’s death and bankruptcy (2004).
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Maxwell’s death, its impact on the football club, and the succession of owners that followed are detailed in Conn (2006).
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Participants at the conference from which this collection arises speculated that this was an example of the ‘planned violence’ about which we were talking. Unquestionably, the construction of the ring-road has created a division within the city. In this sense, urban planning has enacted a kind of figurative ‘violence’ or rupture. Whether this violence was ‘planned’ in another sense (i.e. willful on the part of the planning authorities) is a question about which I am unqualified to comment.
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Conn (2006) describes this story in detail. Company Voluntary Arrangements, or CVAs, allow directors of insolvent companies to negotiate a reduction in their debts with their creditors. Creditors may agree to reductions if it seems clear that—without such negotiation—the company would be wound up, and the credit extended entirely lost.
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The image is reprinted in Ward et al. (1993: 74).
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This continues to be the case in 2017 (see Kollewe 2017). It is worth noting that Oxfordshire’s employment rate is high, with unemployment currently at 3.7%, well below the national average of 6%. As Ward, Stuart, and Swyngedouw predicted as early as 1993 (89), the problem in the city is not employment per se, but the nature of employment available and its relationship with the local housing market.
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It should be noted that the city council has for a long time recognised the Oxford housing crisis, and new homes are now being built in the Barton neighbourhood. Proposed developments in the Grenoble Road area around the Kassam Stadium have received strong support, but continue to be hindered by the protected ‘Green Belt’ status of most land around the city.
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Ghosh, W. (2018). Thames Valley Royal (or, Maxwell in Oxford): The Story of a Football Club and the History of a City. In: Boehmer, E., Davies, D. (eds) Planned Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9_4
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