Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey
by James Attlee
University of Chicago Press ₤12, 296 pages

Don’t let the pretentious title put you off this book. Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey suggests Oxbridge self-importance, but an isolarion turns out to be a 15th-century map showing a small area in great detail. In this offbeat, personal exploration of his city, James Attlee takes not the historic colleges but the prosaic Cowley Road in east Oxford as his chosen map.

Attlee points out that ”Oxford is an untypical city, its centre preserved in aspic for the tourists... Much of the change and diversity in the city has therefore been concentrated into a small area, its visible expression squeezed like toothpaste from a tube along the length of Cowley Road.” Rather than urban sprawl, Attlee finds the essence of the modern city on his doorstep.

He wants to ”do” an old-fashioned pilgrimage, but has commitments: he commutes to London and has a family and mortgage in east Oxford. Instead, he makes short forays, so each chapter deals with a different place or encounter along the road.

Attlee visits African and Russian food shops, an evangelical church, the flotation tank, a synagogue, Indian restaurants, the car factory. He even feels obliged to go into the porn shop.

All these encounters prompt engaging rambles round the author’s store of offbeat knowledge, classical sources, art references and religion. And he makes human connections where most of us would see none. In one chapter Attlee talks to Raissa at the Russian supermarket. She’s setting up a travel agency to send people to Siberia. ”While the connections being forged between Siberia and east Oxford seem extraordinary, they are in keeping with today’s world. A journey to the farthest limits of the globe begins at the travel agent in the local shopping centre, while much of the exploration remaining to be done is in our own backyard.”

The present is compelling, but Attlee also digs into the past. He seeks out tales of life on the local streets many years ago. ”To remain ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child, Cicero maintained... If Cicero was right, is this then adulthood at last, to walk home along Cowley Road, with the present overlaid by the past, the pavements populated by ghosts, and the traffic quietened by the distant echoes of children’s games and horses’ hooves?”

Two decades ago I passed through east Oxford as one of the numberless students who have lived on its lyrically-named roads (Magdalen Road in our case, at the end I now know was once called ”Robin Hood’s” - because it was so rough). Reading Attlee awoke long-abandoned memories of the time. But the student life is a selfish, childish one and we only existed in the moment - we never belonged, or heard the ”distant echoes” of the past.

Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. I want to hand out copies of this book to everyone who tells me that moving to a middle-class suburb would be ”better” for my inner-city children. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society: ”To put it simply, this is what I love about the moment in history I inhabit.”