21st Century

The third millennium dawned with an unforgettable image: New York’s twin towers collapsing in flames. The horror of 9/11, caught on bystanders’ camera-phones and beamed endlessly into living rooms around the world, heralded not only a new chapter in international relations, but also a revolution in the mode, speed, and scale of global communication.

The statistics are mind-boggling. In 2025 the number of active Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube users surpassed three billion, with Instagram and TikTok close behind. Wikipedia attracts over 18 billion page views per month. Google garners the same number of online search requests every day. The number of Tweets can be measured in thousands per second.

The spectacular popularity of the iPhone enabled Apple to become the first technology business in the world to achieve a trillion dollar valuation. Amazon, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta follow close behind. Nine of the top twenty global tech companies are Chinese.

Oxford is one of the UK’s premier technology hubs. The commercial arm of the University, Oxford University Innovation, has spun out nearly 200 companies since the turn of the millennium, and a new patent application is filed more or less every week. There are also significant tech businesses located here which are not directly related to the University. The Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, for example, a few miles south of the city, is home to two hundred organisations and companies, employing more than five thousand staff. Its expansion is guaranteed following the recent acquisition of an adjoining 220-acre site.

Oxford’s reputation as a world leader in medicine was dramatically highlighted in 2020. Dame Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology and head of the Jenner Institute, led the race to develop the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine, over three billion doses of which were distributed worldwide. A Barbie doll was created in her honour and put on public display in Oxford’s History of Science Museum.

Meanwhile, the University embarked on a rapid phase of millennial development and expansion. (We should say both universities, for Oxford Polytechnic became Oxford Brookes University in 1992, enlarged its campus significantly, and currently enrols even more undergraduates than its older neighbour down the hill.) New centres like the Saïd Business School (2002) and the Blavatnik School of Government (2012) came into being at considerable expense. There was a major re-development of the old Radcliffe Infirmary site (now known as The Radcliffe Observatory Quarter). The Mathematics Institute transferred there in 2013. And, in 2025, centre stage was taken by the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, an investment estimated at $185 million. Beneath its capacious atrium were housed 150,000 books from various different subject libraries, plus a 500-seat concert hall, a theatre, a cinema, a dance studio, exhibition spaces featuring the Bate Collection of historic musical instruments, and a café open to all – University members and non-members alike.

A recent visitor to these parts is the one of the world’s richest men, Larry Ellison, founder of the Information Technology giant, Oracle. Not only is he funding (at a cost of more than $1 billion) the construction of an entire Technology Institute and campus in Littlemore; he has also acquired The Eagle and Child pub – famous for its association with the Inklings – the upper rooms of which will be transformed into a common room for visiting ‘Ellison Scholars’.

Many such new building initiatives around Oxford have been architecturally distinguished and award-winning. One or two – the abominations of Castle Mill and Barton Park in particular – were shockingly banal and unpopular: missed opportunities to do something distinctive and pleasing. ‘Oxford North’, with its looming ‘lab spaces’ and nearby blockhouses, seems to be following the same depressing precedent.

Oxford’s expansionist affluence comes at a cost to the natural and visual environment. The green world is in retreat. Long-loved vistas are under threat. And such wealth as is generated by the various injections of new investment is far from evenly distributed. According to a recent Government report, Oxford remains, as it has been since the Norman Conquest, ‘a starkly unequal city’, with glaring disparities between the richest and poorest areas, and one of the lowest ratios of average wages to house prices in the UK.

In other twenty-first century developments, a large mosque opened on Manzil Way, reflecting the rise of the Muslim population in East Oxford. Oxford United announced its intention to move from the Kassam Stadium to a purpose-built arena in Kidlington. A new railway line to London was opened at Oxford Parkway, and plans were approved to re-open and extend a branch line linking Littlemore, Cowley, Blackbird Leys and Greater Leys to central Oxford (and beyond, to London Marylebone) a development which Council leaders described as ‘the single most important piece of infrastructure for connecting local communities and businesses, research hubs and science facilities, in south and east Oxford’.

The Westgate carpark was torn down and replaced with a giant retail complex. Lucy’s closed its Eagle Ironworks, and, also in 2005, MG Motors went into administration (its assets and brand purchased by Nanjing Automobile Group.) Just over a century after the first car had rolled out of the Morris Motor Palace and onto Longwall Street, a congestion charge was introduced, along with bus gates, as part of Oxford’s commitment to carbon neutrality.

In 2023 Lubna Arshad was sworn in as the city’s Lord Mayor, the first Muslim woman of colour and the youngest person ever to hold that esteemed office. Oxford University’s first female Vice-Chancellor was appointed in 2016 – a mere eight centuries after the foundation of the University, and just as the last Oxford college finally went co-ed.

Nearly fifty years to the day after Apollo 11 touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity there was another dramatic and highly symbolic moon-landing. On this occasion the spacecraft was launched from China, thereby confirming its status as a superpower to rival America. Oxford now educates over two thousand Chinese students. The large and impressive China Centre on Canterbury Road, lists 75 academic associates on its website, with research interests in many different aspects of Chinese studies. And St Giles is routinely filled with coaches dropping off large groups of Chinese tourists, something unseen two, let alone five, decades ago.

Also established in Oxford in recent times are a variety of cutting-edge research institutes, whose topics of investigation tell us much about the preoccupations of the modern age: The Institute for Ethics in AI, The Oxford Internet Institute, The Environmental Change Institute, and The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, to name but a few.

The so-called Future of Humanity Institute, founded in 2005, proclaimed its all-encompassing mission to be the development of:

… big picture research focus(ing) on the planet-term consequences of our actions today, and the complicated dynamics that are bound to shape our future in significant ways. A key aspect of this is the study of existential risks – events that endanger the survival of Earth-originating, intelligent life or that threaten to drastically and permanently destroy our potential for realising a valuable future.

Who knows what prognostications it will make, or how the history of modern Oxford will be written in the years to come?

Perhaps a clue is offered by another twenty-first century structure? One of the smallest and least known Oxford colleges is the strangely named Harris Manchester. In 2014, with funding from two Thai benefactors, a new building was opened – with a traditional entrance portico and, adjoining it, an octagonal belltower. There is nothing modern about the architectural vision, and nothing digital about the clockface which adorns it. This is old-fashioned architecture achieved in the most up-to-date way, topped off by a copper weathervane featuring a book-bearing Oxford don on a bicycle, wearing a mortar board and gown.

On the tower is an inscription attributed to the crime novelist, translator and classicist Dorothy L. Sayers (born in Oxford and a graduate of Somerville College):

It’s later than you think.

But it’s never too late.

The words were chosen in recognition of the college’s population of mature students (you have to be over twenty-one to study there). In similar vein, the clock chimes at two minutes past the hour.

Idiosyncratic. Thought-provoking. Oxford.