A St Clement’s resident, Jane Harrison, and colleagues at Kellogg College, have won £250,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund for their exciting East Oxford Community Archaeology Project. It has big pluses for St Clement’s, including the fight to preserve the landscape around Bartlemas Chapel in which Graham Jones, Liberal Democrat City Councillor for the ward, has contributed his professional as well as personal support.

The project gets off the ground in September, when Jane will give an update presentation to the City Council’s East Area Committee. It aims to involve the people of East Oxford, young and old, in uncovering their past from the earliest times up to the last century, using maps, place-names, documents, archaeology, and field-work. The project web-site tells more: http://www.archeox.net/

Graham reminded the May meeting of the committee that the project will raise local awareness of, and pride in their communities and localities; address employment and exclusion issues by providing young people with transferable skills; and extend Oxford’s tourism profile beyond Magdalen Bridge.

Graham’s particular interest is in what may be discovered about the origins and development of the Bartlemas hamlet, based on a thirteenth-century leper hospital which he suspects may have more ancient roots (see references to St Bartholomew dedications in his book Saints in the Landscape, published by Tempus in 2007, his chapter in George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig, eds, Medieval Monastic Education, and a number of conference papers). He submitted his professional opinion to the Inspector considering the Oriel College application to replace the former nursery school behind Southfield Road with a large student accommodation block. Graham signed the on-line petition opposing the application, and has offered to give a lecture to raise funds for Divinity Road Residents Association, who have spearheaded local opposition. Graham attended their successful fund-raising concert, performed in the chapel itself. To his on-line signature he added: ‘The Bartlemas chapel and farm constitute a crucially sensitive element of the East Oxford town- and landscape’.