- In 1986, the residents of New High Street
in Headington, near Oxford,
woke up to find there was a new addition to the road:
a shark in the roof of number two.
It was commissioned by the owner of the house.
It's protest artwork, anti-war,
symbolic of bombs crashing down into buildings.
And of course, English planning laws do not allow someone
to suddenly install a giant shark sculpture
in their roof in a residential area.
At least, not without consulting the neighbors first.
- So in 1986, my dad put a 25ft fiberglass and steel shark
through the roof of his house.
He'd just bought his first house
and the first night he moved in, he heard planes going overhead,
he was sort of woken by this.
And in the morning he read the newspaper
and, I suppose, saw destroyed houses in Libya that had been bombed.
The story goes that my dad and sculptor John Buckley
were sat, drinking, celebrating, the purchase of this house,
sort of mulling over how to deal with the shock of the bombing of Tripoli.
They were up for a fight, and they did this shark
without planning permission, in secret.
There was this sort of mixed reaction.
A lot of people were shocked
and didn't quite know what was going on.
I think some people thought it might have been real
which is an eyeopener and certainly funny looking back.
A lot of people just loved it and thought it was brilliant,
right from the word go.
The council, obviously, were very much "not here, thank you,
"and certainly not without planning permission, this is outrageous".
- So the months and years after the shark was installed
played out exactly as you would expect.
The council said take it down. The owner said no. It went to court.
It took six years to resolve and the shark was eventually allowed to stay
when a senior British government official intervened
and said, "Yes, this has enough artistic merit that,
"as a one off, it can stay."
And now it's an icon of the area, known around the world,
and as far as I can tell,
generally liked by the folks around here.
Perhaps a bit more than the current owner would like.
Before we get to that though, I did have a couple
of more practical questions about the shark.
Like: does it have a head?
- It doesn't have a head.
It's just a half bust of a shark crashing through the roof.
I think they cut a crude hole and dropped that in
with a crane initially,
and then sort of shored it up as soon as they humanly could.
There was no preparation, obviously, because that would've tipped people off.
It's fiberglass with steel reinforcement.
The steel struts on the inside connect out
through the ceiling and down into the walls.
So it's structurally connected. It's there to stay.
It needs repainting every now and then.
And there's just continual checking to make sure
everything's in tiptop condition.
- This year, thanks for a nomination
from a presumably well-meaning member of the public,
the shark was put on the local list of heritage assets.
Now the shark isn't on the national list of protected buildings yet.
It could still be taken down without breaking the law,
but local registration is often the first step
to being on the national list.
And owning a listed building is a pretty significant burden.
The local government requires you to keep it in good condition
and also keep it the same.
And if you don't, they can fix it themselves and bill you.
Art, just like anything else, requires upkeep.
And there are news stories that show that over the last few decades,
the shark, and this house, were sometimes in extremely poor condition.
- Drop a shark through the roof of your house,
there's some leakage problems that one might immediately encounter!
It turns out it's very difficult to repair those.
Until finally my mum ultimately stepped in
and did the whole thing up to, I think, quite a nice standard.
Though I've been renting it out as an Airbnb,
it's just a lovely place and it means a lot to me
and I like that people can come and be close to it and part of it too.
So someone put it forward for the Oxford Asset Heritage Register.
On the council website, they say that there's absolutely no restrictions placed.
This is just for their record keeping.
But they do mention that any planning permission changes
will necessarily take this into consideration.
I thought this was an interesting take because, well,
nominally this is here to preserve this shark
but this is controlled through the planning laws.
And seems to me you can't really preserve something
that's specifically there to challenge that.
That seems to be completely absurd. And to miss sort of the artistic point,
which is probably the thing you would want to preserve,
if you're preserving a piece of art!
- As a bystander, I love art like this,
where part of the work is how it interfaces
with the world and with bureaucracy.
But for the local officials it must be frustrating
because they know that anything they do to this shark
becomes part of the art, part of the story.
List it, unlist it, demand its removal,
demand its preservation, deliberately ignore it,
whatever they do, that's art now!
I wouldn't want to be in that position.
- So my dad passed away in 2019.
We spoke a little bit about the listing just before he did.
He had sort of mixed feelings.
On the one hand, he had been fighting
against the council for a large portion of his life.
And on the other hand, he had these considerations
about the legacy of the place moving forward
and liked that they were acknowledging him.
You've got this idea that the council have come around
and changed their mind and are now embracing
something they weren't before.
And on the other hand, you've got this, I think, slightly more truthful side,
which is that these are totally different councillors.
The councillors that hated it are all gone.
And these new ones, although they love it
are applying the same kind of control,
which again, flies in the face of the piece.
I guess there's a bit of conflict there.
I wish he was still here to ask and see how it all panned out.
I think he'd like that we're still talking about it today, very much.
- For now, the shark is not protected, not officially.
In a few years... who knows?