Living Heritage

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
William Morris

by Heath

Jericho derives its name from the public house-cum-farm calel Jericho House, first noted in 1668. It has tremendous historical significance as, for instance, Oxford's earliest industrial base and as the location for some of the most significant episodes in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites, the only British art movement to have international significance. It was in Jericho that Burne-Jones and William Morris first clapped eyes on Rosetti's paintings in Printers' House in Great Clarendon Street and where they decided to abandon their theological studies in Oxford and become painters.

Jericho has also been home to a number of Oxford thinkers, such as Isaiah Berlin, and St Sepulchre’s Cemetery houses their remains – notably those of Benjamin Jowett ("I am the Master of Balliol College, and what I don't know is not knowledge") and Thomas Combe, the Pre-Raphaelites' first patron and the inventor of Oxford India paper upon which the Oxford Englsih Dictionary was printed. Jericho's landmark, St Barnabas' Church, with its magnificent Romanesque tower, is featured in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and the suburb has inspired Colin Dexter and Philip Pullman, on whom, of course, Jericho's boaters have had a powerful influence in the creation of Pullman's "Gyptians".

The Church is the subject of an idyllic poem by Betjeman, celebrating its magical architecture, and Betjeman himself was also instrumental in both preventing the canal in Jericho from being filled in and stopping a road from being driven through Jericho in the 1960s (linking it to a now-abandoned road-building scheme part of which was planned to run across Christ Church Meadow). Betjeman's daughter recently wrote a piece in 'The Oldie' extolling "unassuming small-scale Jericho"; its unique history and its distinctive canal-side atmosphere with its "myriad streets of modest two-up and two-down cottages". Speaking of the church of St Barnabas she wrote: "It must be one of the most powerful Victorian interiors in the land."

Lewis Carroll took delivery of the first edition of 'Alice in Wonderland' here, and the canal was regularly used by T. E. Lawrence whose childhood was spent in nearby Polstead Road; it was also visited by George Eliot who wrote glowingly of it, as did Keats to his sister Fanny. Jericho is the one place left offering the same access to the canal which, once upon a time, all of the above enjoyed.

Heathcote Williams (circa 2006, with minor amends by Mark Davies, 2021)