Oxford likes to show off its spires, but right here you meet the town that served the gown. The colleges bought the glory; working Oxford built, ferried, sold, repaired, and rowed it. This tour is really about Oxford’s invisible labour... the people missing from the postcard.
At the north end of Folly Bridge, John and Stephen Salter arrived from Wandsworth in eighteen fifty-eight and took over Isaac King’s boatyard. Beside you, the Head of the River began as the wharf house and warehouse in eighteen twenty-seven, though the wharf itself reaches back at least to sixteen thirty-eight. Oxford does enjoy pretending everything began with a clever undergraduate.
Salter’s built almost anything that floats: rowing boats, canoes, steam launches, lifeboats, and the college barges moored by Christ Church Meadow as floating clubhouses. They even made oars here. In eighteen eighty-eight they sent the steamer Alaska all the way from Oxford to Kingston upon Thames.
But the heart of the place is the Andrews family. Len Andrews started here at fourteen, on New Year’s Day in nineteen thirty; his brothers Fred, George, and Albert all worked on the same payroll. Len built boats, repaired engines, then skippered them. Albert went on to serve Oxford University Boat Club; George worked for Exeter and Brasenose. Albert even trained for the nineteen forty-eight Olympics, then got barred as a professional because he lived on the water... which is a neat way to punish people for working.
Salter’s still runs today, in the fifth and sixth generation. When you’re ready, head toward the heart of town for Alice’s Shop on Saint Aldate’s, about five minutes away. Salter’s is open daily from ten in the morning until eleven-thirty at night.
