On 14th November 2022 Liz Woolley gave a fact-filled talk: From Axtell to Zacharias: the Men who built Oxford.
Oxford expanded greatly in the 19th century and Liz Woolley’s talk introduced us to the men who shaped the development of the city in the Victorian era. They were builders, craftsmen, architects, and other professionals, as well as speculators, large and small. Several of them played multiple roles in business, politics and local government, George Parsons Hester being an example. He was a solicitor and later Town Clerk of Oxford who bought Osney Island in the early 1850s. He paid £65 per acre and quickly sold, for around £800 per acre, 125 plots to be developed by local builders. Thanks to its proximity to the new railway stations, the scheme was, for Hester at least, a great success. But the island was prone to flooding and the houses were very small and sometimes of poor quality.
Other notable builders of Oxford included the architect Samuel Lipscomb Seckham, who designed Park Town, which was completed in the early 1860s. In contrast to Osney Island, where the houses were occupied mostly by railway workers and other artisans, Park Town was marketed to the middle classes. William Wilkinson was another very successful architect, who was responsible for the Randolph Hotel and for the development of North Oxford on land owned by St John’s College, work which, following his retirement, was completed by his nephew, H W Moore. Walter Gray was a speculative property developer who played a central role in the development of North Oxford as the broker between college, architect and builders. Gray exemplified the close links between property development and politics: he was elected a city councillor in 1881, served four times as Oxford’s Mayor, and was knighted in 1903. Other notable builders and tradesmen included Thomas Axtell, a stonemason and partner in the firm of Symm & Co, which closed in 2020, and Thomas Henry Kingerlee, whose firm continues to the present day, under the fifth generation of family ownership.