Space & Culture

I’m completely fascinated by the college lawns in Oxford and Cambridge. Whether large or small, they are some of the most perfectly controlled, and beautifully resisted, spaces I’ve ever seen.

Gardens have been favoured by philosophers and scholars since the days of Ancient Greece, and while Oxbridge gardens are often open to the public, it takes a casual observer only moments to recognise that the quadrangle college lawns are special, even when used for games:

“Do not walk on the Sacred Spaces unless you are accompanying a Fellow…[T]he Sacred Space of a college is not in the Chapel. It is one or more areas of grass, usually inside the college courtyard. [At Tyndale House] we do not have a Master, nor Porters, but we do have a Sacred Space. It is called the Croquet Lawn. This particular Sacred Space has certain taboos attached to it…

1) Croquet is an extremely aggressive game, so an Englishman expresses no outward emotion while playing it.
2) Croquet mallets are uniquely designed for smashing open one’s opponent’s skull. It is therefore impolite to raise them above ankle height. Pretend, instead, that the ball is your opponent’s skull. This will improve your aim and your appreciation of the whole ethos of the game.
3) Croquet lawns, like all Cambridge Sacred Spaces, should be walked on only in flat shoes (this is the main reason that Cambridge colleges are suspicious of women Fellows).
4) Outward signs of respect to the Croquet lawn are appreciated, such as occasionally kissing the grass or a short silent prayer before stepping on it.

Virginia Woolf, in explaining why a woman needs a room of her own, tells a story of how she lost her grip on an idea when she was driven off a college lawn:

“…Alas, laid on the grass, how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating…But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind - put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cutaway coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a beadle, I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the fellows and scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path, the arms of the beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the fellows and scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that, in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding. What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember…”

The idea that college lawns were places of rational order and restricted access was made clear - and challenged - in Victorian student cartoons that satirised them being overtaken by pandemonium:

And today, both despite and because of their continued reverence as spaces nurtured over hundreds of years, a Cambridge student will risk “expulsion, beheading, hanging and any number of other archaic punishments in the University Constitution to build a snowman on Chapel Court lawns before the porters catch him” and ultimately receive a fine for erecting just part of a snowman in Parker’s Piece.

Male students continue to describe their introduction to the college lawns along these lines: “One could summarize the orientation for new students at St. John’s College with six words: ‘Do not walk on the grass.’ If you’ve seen the pristine lawns of the Oxford colleges, you know why they do not want students trouncing on the turf. If you have not seen the magnificent and extraordinarily maintained grass, you should know that like everything else at Oxford, it is part of a tradition and will never change,” while graduating young women indirectly tell porters what they think about the lawn rules.

I wonder if Virginia Woolf ever imagined our sex encroaching on these sacred spaces as cheeky tourists and drunken party-girls?

For KG.

This entry was posted Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.