Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door.
Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood.
From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization?
Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.
James Attlee works in art publishing in London and is the coauthor of Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction
FIRST PARTITION
Embarkation Purification Of Music and Cannibalism Doing My Part The Melancholy Pilgrim Bread and Circuses Boucherie Chatar Designated Desire-Lines: Planning a New Road Further Purification of the Pilgrim Enrobed Of Love and Jewels Behind the Blue Door (Inside the Private Shop) From the Literal to the Allegorical and Back Wittgenstein’s Lion and a Cappuccino Sea Virtual Streets and Gateways: The Plans Revisited Cosmonauts and Coleslaw St. Edmund’s Well and a Faded Warning
SECOND PARTITION
Making Do and Getting By Egyptian Vagabonds, Afternoon Men, and the Malus Genius of Our Nation Losing the Key Bed-Sits and Birardari What They Think You Can Bear: Football, Religion, and Nightmares on the Cowley Road Between Two Fires: Pulling the Dragon’s Teeth Melancholy, an American Photographer, and the Irish Writer Cowley Road Calling Just Less Lucky Dreadlocks and Rim-Shots: Reggae at the Zodiac Of Lepers, Lunatics, and Layabouts Dancing Sand and Zum-Zum Water Junior Jihad Of Books and Bitumen Carnival Returning to the Source
THIRD PARTITION
A Journey in the Hinterland Into the Furnace Blessings and Tribulation A Graveyard Reborn Finding a Clue Of Bats and Mutton Curry Margaret’s Story A Hidden Pool The Liquid Kingdom The Gateways Close Of Robots, Wild Rhubarb, and the New Oxford Way Things Fall Apart: An Ending of Sorts
