On your left is the Morris Garage, and it feels like the right place to end. William Richard Morris did not begin with grandeur. He was born in Worcester in eighteen seventy-seven, his family returned to Oxford in eighteen eighty, and at fifteen, in eighteen ninety-three, he apprenticed to a cycle maker in St Giles'. When his employer refused him a pay rise, Morris answered with teenage nerve and hard arithmetic: at sixteen he started repairing bicycles in a shed behind his parents' house at sixteen James Street, Cowley St John, with four pounds of capital.
By nineteen oh-one he had rented forty-eight High Street. In nineteen oh-two he took over the disused livery stables here at Holywell and Long Wall. Then in nineteen oh-nine and nineteen ten he demolished them and hired Tollit and Lee to design this building. The Oxford Journal Illustrated called it Oxford's new motor palace on the thirteenth of July, nineteen ten. Nicely understated.
The prototype Morris Oxford was assembled here in nineteen twelve. In nineteen thirteen Morris moved serious manufacturing to Temple Cowley, but this address still mattered hugely: under Cecil Kimber, the mechanics here invented and first made M-G, meaning Morris Garage.
The building nearly vanished in nineteen seventy-seven. Instead, in nineteen eighty, John Fryman kept the frontage, side elevation, and roof when New College turned it into student accommodation. It is now Grade II listed, and the display includes Morris's car radiator and his two-branch table lamp.
From Len Andrews learning boatbuilding at fourteen by Folly Bridge to Morris learning cycle-making at fifteen in St Giles', Oxford trained the hands that first ferried, then drove, the gown. And in nineteen thirty-seven, Morris even bought the bargees' wharf at Nuffield. River to road... watermen to apprentice... the same town, still serving the gown.
