Sorry to 'do a Lazarus' on this thread, but before the Clarendon was built in the mid-eighties, the bit of Shoe Lane that went through to Cornmarket was a kind of narrow subway, people used to call it the windsock, as it got a bit blowy. It used to run parallel to Woolies before it relocated to the Cowley Centre.
Another thing that has just occured to me - the LO Map: I could be wrong but some of the Streets were built after they knocked down the St Ebbe's area where the Westgate centre is now - back -to-backs where my nan was born. I'd like to think the planners in LO gave the Westgate a miss...
The history of my version of L-world's Shoe Lane is a little murky. I originally invented a narrow road, full of shops and small businesses, that ran southish from the High (more or less opposite the Covered Market) down to Blue Boar Street. I called it Shoe Lane, after the Shoe Lane I once worked close to in London (it's near Fleet Street). There was a pub, the Talbot Inn, where my Shoe Lane met the High.
Then, when I was planning the short story
Dearer Than Eyesight I downloaded a PDF map of central Oxford from somewhere-or-other, as I needed to get my narrator from Bodley's Library to Albert Terrace (in Jericho) in a credible (i.e. geographically correct) manner. This was before the publication of
Lyra's Oxford. To my horror, I discovered that there'd been a real Shoe Lane in Oxford all along.
So I moved my L-world Shoe Lane to more or less its location in our world and hoped nobody would notice.
Or care.
In the end, though, I can't help thinking that St Michael's Street as it is now more closely resembles Shoe Lane as I originally conceived it. It's much too late to change now, though. Shoe Lane is thoroughly stuck in my imagination and will forever, so far as I am concerned, be where Bigsby and Jarrett, Bookbinders, James and James, Makers Of Fine Clocks And Instruments and Maison Jeanette, Modes For The Lady Of Distinction, are to be found.
. I wouldn't want to make-over Oxford.
... so there is no 31 April?
