All the fun of the Fair

At the present time central Oxford has taken on the particular aspect it wears early each September when we have St Giles Fair. This takes over St Giles Street and those which feed into it from the Sunday following St Giles' Day on September 1st, when the Fair is set up, and for the following Monday and Tuesday. Buses and other traffic are re-routed, one can walk down the middle of St Giles as the roundabouts and other attractions - most of which require a head for heights and speed I have never possessed - fill the open space and transform the space into something quite other than its normal one of traffic and trade and academic endeavour (or lack thereof ). 

St Giles Fair

Image:england.prm.ox.ac.uk

The sense of the world being turned upside down for a few days, the sound of blaring music and the shrieks of delight and terror from the fairground rides, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers, and the sight of old-fashioned family entertainment and people carrying home balloons and ridiculously large prizes they have won at the stalls and indeed, most importantly, of families of all ages and backgrounds enjoying an afternoon or evening out, and generally of large numbers of good-humoured people simply having a good time is always heartening.

Vertiginous pleasures outside St John's College

Image:timmyatt.com

St Giles Fair

Today is the second and last day of St Giles Fair here in Oxford. A popular saint in twelfth century England St Giles is the patron of the parish that developed at that time around the northern end of the wide road towards Woodstock and Banbury outside the north gate of the Anglo-Saxon city. As his feast day falls on September 1st it was in past centuries a good time at which to hold a fair to buy and sell as the autumn set in. Many towns held fairs at this season - most famously Winchester - but not many survive. In Oxford it still does.

Here St Giles' Fair is very much part of the life of the city, but not especially of the University, which is not up at this time of year. Oxford, happily, has not, like my home town of Pontefract did in the interwar years, exiled such a fair to waste ground away from the centre but gives up the whole of St Giles Street - still the main route into the city centre from the north - over to the Fair on the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday following September 1st.

Picking one's way through a wide rage of ever more spectacular, noisy, flashing, and not infrequently, frankly terrifying, rides and sideshows, not to mention the pervasive smell of the cooking of burgers and hot dogs, gives a new quality to walking to and from Mass on these days. What St Giles - a hermit and then an abbot - would make of it is open for speculation, but it is, nevertheless, and even if the people attending never give him a thought, a celebration of him.

To my mind, what is also good about it, firstly, is that it is a living tradition - loud and
vulgar it may be, but it reasserts a popular way of letting off steam and enjoying oneself. Last nights drizzle and rain did not appear to be damping that.

Secondly, it is really heartening to see so many families there - fathers and mothers taking their children to the fair, rather as I was fifty years ago. The fair may be garish and dressed up in the latest modern fashion, but at heart it is as it was fifty or a hundred years ago. In a simple and unsophisticated way it reasserts popular family values, and long may it do so.