Playtime in St Giles’
In a city where the smallest change to how we get around creates headlines, it might come as a surprise that the widest street in the city centre is closed for two days each year... for a funfair.
But Oxford is also a city which enjoys tradition. St Giles’ Fair dates from either 1624 or 1625 – no one seems to agree, but it's definitely been going for four centuries, give or take a world war and a pandemic.
St Giles’ is a street wide enough that in any other country we would call it a boulevard. It runs north–south from the point where the roads from Woodstock and Banbury meet, past St John’s College and an underground toilet hotel, almost as far as Broad Street and Cornmarket.
Installing a funfair means closing the road (rerouting buses and suspending parking, for both cars and bikes) and transporting massive fairground equipment. Hair-raising rides wait to fling you high enough in the air for a glimpse over the walls of colleges. The juxtaposition of sober stone and gaudy lights attracts Oxford’s photographers every year.
Feast and festival
The fair was originally a festival for the parish of St Giles, and takes place over the two days following the first Sunday after St Giles’ Day (the 1st of September). In 2025, St Giles’ Fair is happening on Monday 8 and Tuesday 9 September. In some years the fair is a last hurrah for schoolchildren, but this year their term will already have started. Fortunately it runs from 11 in the morning to 11 at night, so kids won’t miss out, whether they go before or after dark.
As well as thrill rides with names like ‘Sky Flyer’ and ‘Storm’ (and the promise of a new ride from Capital Funfairs), fairgoers can expect merry-go-rounds, dodgems, and a helter skelter, as well as burgers and candy floss. This year there will even be a model version of the fair in St Giles’ Church (Monday only).
Where May Morning was originally ‘gown’, St Giles' Fair is unmistakably ‘town’. There is an urban legend that St John’s College tolerates the crowds and noise because it owns the land beneath St Giles’ and collects all the profits. It's true that St John’s owns most of the buildings which line the street, and it did formerly extract a toll as the lord of the manor. But the road is now a public highway in the control of the County Council, while the fair has been run by the City Council since 1930 (with the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain).
What comes next?
Come Wednesday morning, the fair will pack up until the following September. But what if the spirit of fun could stay? That’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. Reimagining St. Giles’ comes up increasingly frequently in dispatches. The uninspiringly-named Central Oxfordshire Movement and Place Framework proposed by the County Council is exploring radical ideas for how to use Oxford's city centre streets, including St Giles’. The Oxford City Centre Action Plan, published by Oxford City Council in 2022, talks about “a reimagined and redesigned St Giles’ as a world class public space while protecting its heritage assets and their setting” (their comparator was Place de la Republique in Paris). And in this year’s budget cycle, the County Council proposed £900,000 for public realm improvements to St Giles’, intended for “socialising, greening, and improved access for pedestrians and cyclists”.
The Oxplay campaign is publicly agnostic about where in the city centre it would like to see a children's playground, but St Giles’ must be a likely option. Together with other contenders like Broad Street, Gloucester Green, or Worcester Street, it could provide a family-friendly ‘alternative centre’ for the city, and help pull footfall from the juggernaut that is the Westgate.
Whatever the future holds for St Giles’, the Clarion wishes you all the fun of the fair. As usual, it will be opened by the Lord Mayor, with a blessing from local clergy as a “source of recreation and innocent pleasure to old and young”. If you can't go, you can watch it on the Oxford Internet Institute’s webcam – or wait for one of the fairs coming up in Witney, Chipping Norton, Thame, Abingdon, Woodstock, or Banbury!