https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/19607563.novel-walk-around-oxford-author-sylvia-vetta/

Most visitors to Oxford cluster around a few streets of Dreaming Spires and, in my opinion, miss out on the complexities of this beautiful city. I recommended a few books on the subject for  https://shepherd.com/best-books/oxford-and-where-town-meets-gown

In Sculpting the Elephant, my protagonist, Harry King, is from Cowley. He’s an artist but is unaware that he needs a muse. He bumps into Ramma Gupta and the story begins. Ramma is  Gown. She’s reading for a DPhil in history exploring why the founder of Buddhism, Asoka, was written out of history for over a thousand years.

For 10 years, I ran a business in a former Oxford FACTORY – Coopers Oxford Marmalade factory with its wonderful iron gates made by the former Lucy Ironworks based in Jericho, which is part of that untold history. Gill Hedge and I renamed the Marmalade Factory the Jam Factory and the name has stuck. I designed an alternative Oxford walk that starts at the Jam Factory, goes through St Thomas’s where, with neighboring St Ebbes, there were once eleven  breweries & malthouses,  along the canal to Jericho where there was once eleven pubs and, even now there are six , three of which appear in Sculpting the Elephant.

… The location of the business I invent for Harry ‘Decorators’  

Harry inherits a little money from an aunt and sets up Decorators – his art and design shop in upwardly mobile, Walton Street. I recently took the CeO of Claret Press, Katie Isbester on the Sculpting the Elephant walk and took the pic of her with a Canadian friend where I imagined it’s location. From there, we cross the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter,(ROQ) arguably the most exciting development in Oxford for 300 years. My artist friend Weimin He was artist in residence @the ROQ for six years and his book Tower of the Winds is one I recommend on Shepherd.com . The pics above are some of his paintings of the Observatory. Weimin  has also painted an ox for the Oxtrail and I’m looking forward to seeing it in situ, today, outside the Observatory.

 

In my opinion, the greatest work of art in the city is to be found at the ROQ and we walk all over it! I do hope I can persuade readers to do so respectfully. Roger Penrose in an incredible mathematician who devised the everlasting pattern and moreover it NEVER REPEATS itself. Surely that is a concept worthy of Leonardo Da Vinci! Roger is also an artist and the pavement was created by him.

 

The walk then enters the world of the GOWN and ends at the former Indian Institute from where my story goes to INDIA and Nalanda t0 the world’s first International University founded by Asoka 250 years before Christ .

Today I’m taking some friends from my book group on the STE walk  If anyone wants me to lead a group   on this fascinating bit of hidden Oxford history, get in touch.