Take a short bus ride south-east, from under the dome of the Queen’s College on Oxford High Street, past the aloof spires of Magdalen College and beneath them the tourists wobbling in their rented punts, past the botanical gardens, the cricket fields and sculls of Magdalen College school, the Iffley Road sports grounds where Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile, past a sign for the City of Oxford Rowing Club, and the city begins to thin into green surrounding hills and a view, as Cardinal Newman once wrote to a friend from his rooms in Rose Hill, “too good for me”.
That was in 1831. A century later, in the 1930s, a housing estate was built there. It was intended for those coming, often from defunct mines in Wales, to work in the Morris (now the Mini) factory at Cowley. By the time of the second world war, the city had built 2,000 dwellings here. They fan out from a large grassy roundabout called the Oval, along the northern side of which sits a long, low-slung building, Rose Hill Primary school.
