origins of Summertown

Some thoughts on:

The Butcher, The Tailor, The Picture-Frame Maker...
Stories of Middle Way
Gareth Winrow
The Book Guild 2023

The author investigates the history of the house he lives in and the land it stands on, which is interesting to me because it happens to be in Oxford, and it offers an unusual angle on the history of our city. As a family history researcher, I am also interested in how such projects work for others and how they translate into books. (I've actually used the butcher et al line for a blog entry myself.)

There are some challenges inherent to Winrow's project: His house is only less than a century old. It was built after 1928 on the land of the former Summerhill estate which was auctioned off in 1925. Summertown as a village is only two centuries old and doesn't have a wildly interesting history.

Winrow found the stories he connects to his address not in the actual house nor on the plot it stands on. He looked more widely into the lives of the people who happened to own the land over the last few centuries, along with their ancestry and business connections, making for a vast cast of characters most of whom have only a tenuous connection to the place of interest. The main characters and land-owners are (note that the first four died before the house was built):

• Elizabeth Buswell (1725-1815) who was sentenced to death for poisoning her housemaid and pardoned at the last minute by King George II.
• Henry John North (1756-1831), a lawyer, town clerk and land speculator based in Woodstock;
• John Brain (1798-1855), a butcher who mysteriously disappeared after the death of his young wife;
• James Ryman (c.1795-1880), a picture-frame maker and art dealer who befriended luminaries of the Victorian art world such as Turner and Ruskin (no indication whether he's related to Henry Ryman, founder of the stationery business);
• Florence Bocker (1909-2001), the widow of a colonial officer in Burma, actually lived at the address in question for several decades.

All of these stories are interesting in their own way, but I'm coming away with the impression that the house in question is getting overlooked. We learn virtually nothing about it from the lives of these landowners, and it just serves as an excuse to snoop into these past lives. We don't even get a description of the premises or an insight into the original shape and size, before the recent owners built their extensions.

The exciting things mostly happen in central Oxford (eg the picture frame maker's connection to Turner's famous views of Oxford), sometimes further afield, even as far as India and Burma, but rarely in Summertown. Thus, cycling through Summertown after reading the book

To me as a fellow family history researcher it is interesting that all of these characters come with a well-researched family history, but I feel for the general reader this is just a bit too nerdy and burdened with detail. Which explains the publishing format.

My house is a bit older and I have looked into its history only very fleetingly, but I wouldn't quite dare trying to make a book out of it ...

There is a clue in the cover as well, which shows the Radcliffe Camera rather than a view of Summertown.