One drizzly afternoon this past April, Anne Whitehouse and John Buckley stood outside a two-story brick house on New High Street, in the English suburb of Headington, Oxford. The house is typical of the area in most ways, apart from the twenty-five-foot shark that sticks out of its roof, as if dropped, nose first, from the sky. The tail leans forward slightly toward the road, and, on this particular morning, it glistened with rainwater. Buckley, a sculptor who bears a striking resemblance to Santa Claus, installed the shark in cahoots with the house’s owner, Bill Heine, an American from Illinois, who moved to Oxford in the late nineteen-sixties to study law. Heine, who went on to manage nearby cinemas and later presented a local radio show, died, of cancer, on April 2nd, and Buckley was feeling reflective. “It’s sort of unreal, when you come around the corner,” he said, looking skyward toward the caudal fin.
Buckley and Heine first had the idea to plant a shark in the roof of Heine’s house in 1986, over a glass of wine on the street outside. They’d visited the sculptures in the gardens at Sutton Place, in Surrey, and were feeling inspired. Heine was also agitated about recent political events. On the day he’d bought the house, American bombs had fallen on Tripoli and Benghazi, in Libya. Buckley, who lives a short drive away from the house, had just returned from a sailing trip in the Pacific. “I’d been drawing a lot of sharks,” he recalled. He was terrified of them, and often imagined what it would be like to be attacked by one, the way it would hurtle into him out of the deep. The image of a shark seemed to the men an apt metaphor for the bombs: the fear of the thunderous crash of the unknown. “Bill suggested putting a shark over the front door,” Buckley said. “I said, ‘Just stick it through the roof.’ ”
Heine and Buckley intended to install the shark—which Buckley and a willing team of volunteers constructed from fibreglass, in a nearby chicken shed—on August 6th, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In the end, it didn’t happen until the morning of August 9th—“which was the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, so it worked out fine,” Buckley explained. Anne Whitehouse, who was eighteen at the time and lived with her mother, June, a few doors down the street, recalled that Heine had told them to be outside early that morning. “He said, ‘I’ve done something a bit controversial—make sure you’re up early to see,’ ” she said. Around 8 A.M., the two women saw a headless shark suspended from a crane.
Whitehouse remembers a crowd gathering, and Buckley and Heine posing for pictures on the roof with a bottle of champagne. “My first thought was that he would get in trouble for having the crane parked there. I thought a traffic warden would come,” she said. “Quite soon I realized he probably hadn’t sought any kind of permission at all.”
Thus began a six-year battle with the Oxford City Council over “Untitled 1986,” as Heine and Buckley called the shark. In 1990, the council refused Heine’s retroactive planning-permission request, and, in 1992, his appeal made its way to the then Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, who is best known for his prominent role in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Many came out in support of the shark, including June Whitehouse. The report by Heseltine’s appointed inspector, Peter Macdonald, read, “Following initial surprise and confusion, she”—June Whitehouse—“had given the matter some consideration and decided that the shark was unique and brilliant.” Until her death, in 2011, June assumed responsibility for the “Sharkive,” a bulging collection of press clippings, which includes references to the shark in a Czech school textbook; a book titled “Eccentric Britain,” which features the shark on its cover; an advertisement for AA home insurance; and coverage of the shark’s various birthday parties, to which the whole street was invited.
Not everyone liked the shark. The county councillor Brian Hook, an architect, argued that “the best art was in sympathy with, and contributed to, its setting.” Moreover, he argued, the shark could provoke copycats: “If the appellant got away with it, why not others? Sharks could be followed by Mickey Mouse, vampires, flashing lights, etc.” Several residents at Alison Clay House, a nearby retirement community, had signed a petition to have it removed, although Rosy Grace, a resident, was in favor of keeping the shark, and had, according to Macdonald’s report, “risen from her sick bed to say so.” Grace alleged foul play: “She did not think that many of those who had signed the petition . . . knew what they were signing,” the report reads, “and some had felt constrained to sign even when they had no real objection.”
The council’s stated objection was that the shark detracted from the harmonious appearance of the street. The inspector agreed, but, in a victory for art and oddness, ruled that, as the contrast was deliberate, the shark should stay. “Lack of harmony in terms of developmental proposals does not always equate with visual harm,” the report read. Heseltine concluded that the fear of a “proliferation, with sharks (and Heaven knows what else) crashing through roofs all over the City,” was exaggerated, and that “any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, and the downright quirky.” He recommended that the Headington shark be allowed to remain. A stipulation detailed that “Untitled 1986” should be “maintained” every nine months, only painted in “naturalistic colours,” and not illuminated later than 10:30 P.M.
In 2016, the shark’s future briefly looked uncertain again. Heine lost his job and, when his mortgage term ended, was unable to qualify for a new one, owing to his age. His son Magnus Hanson-Heine took over the house’s upkeep. Since then, in a spectacular U-turn, members of the Oxford City Council have made vague attempts to get the shark listed on a statutory database controlled by the government-sponsored body Historic England, which prevents significant or historic buildings from being altered or demolished. These have not yet succeeded. Hanson-Heine told me that he was torn. “I think Dad would have liked to see it listed, but, at the same time, it’s strange that the council could force you to keep it, just as they tried to force you to remove it,” he said.
Last summer, Buckley conducted a full repaint of the sculpture. By then, Heine’s health was failing, and Buckley put gold leaf on the tip of the fin, “to send him up to Heaven,” he said, pointing skyward. “Look, it’s shining a little.” Behind us, a young man wandered over to take a photograph on his phone, and, later, a car driven by a groomed blond woman and full of children pulled up to stare at the shark.
David and Linda Clover moved to a house one street over, on Kennett Road, in 1979, and witnessed the shark being installed. They’ve both always been in favor of it, feeling that it has brought excitement to the street. David Clover finds the shark in keeping with the many carvings and gargoyles that cover Oxford’s colleges and churches. “It’s almost like an eighteen-century folly,” he said over tea in his living room, which is painted a tasteful gray-green, to match the Clovers’ floral curtains. The room looks out onto their impeccably maintained garden, and, at the bottom, the shark is framed by trees. “If you sit there, you get a really good view,” Linda Clover said, gesturing to a sofa. Later, in her garden, she grumbled in hushed tones about a neighbor’s increasingly unkempt beech, which was threatening to obstruct the view of the shark. “It’s tricky,” she said, looking at the tangle of branches. “But we can’t do much about it.”
