Transcript
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Erin Menke (0:39)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities,
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a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.
Erin Menke (0:48)
Our world is full of the unexplainable and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. It was the morning of August 9th of 1986 in the neighborhood of Headington, Oxford. It was an unassuming place, suburban, with cookie cutter houses lining a quaint street, a perfectly ordinary British suburb. On that morning though, something had changed. By 8 o' clock a small crowd had gathered outside of a two story brick house on New High street and everyone was looking up. Planted in the roof of the building was a 25 foot tall sculpture of a great white shark, its head embedded into the shingles. It looked as if it had dropped there head first. There was no mystery where the shark came from. Standing beside it on the roof were two men, one of them an American expat named Bill Hayne who owned the house, and the other man was John Buckley, a British sculptor who had crafted this shark. The creators of this piece of art refer to it only as Untitled 1986. It was, at least according to its creators, a political statement set up on the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. It was supposed to represent death coming suddenly from above onto the heads of innocent civilians, like a shark lunging at its prey from the murky darkness of the ocean. Of course, not everyone believed that this was the intent. Skeptics suspected that Hain put up the artwork in order to hide an antenna of some kind, or as a prank for his neighbors. But these lone speculators were not the statue's primary enemy. No, that would be the Oxford City Council. The council took an immediate dislike to the shark. They thought that it was an eyesore on the otherwise pleasant looking row of houses. They were also annoyed that Hayne and Buckley had not gotten any permits to put such a visible statue up. And for years the city council in Hain went to war over this statue Council members created a petition to have it removed and asked everyone in the district to sign. They even solicited signatures from local retirement homes. Meanwhile, Hayne held a birthday every year for the statue, which his neighbors attended in droves. In 1990, as a peacemaking solution, Hayne sent a petition to the council asking for retroactive permission for the statue. The council refused, though, stating that they could not approve a statue that's so disruptive to the neighborhood, it must be taken down, they said. After that, Hayne's petition went all the way to the Department of the Environment. A representative there agreed that the shark was quite disruptive visually, but said that this was clearly the point of the artwork and allowed it to stay. One of the government inspectors sent to survey the shark even called it unique and brilliant. It had taken six years, but after 1992, Untitled, 1986, was safe. However, public pieces of art must be maintained. In the years since then, the sculpture, referred to by locals as the Headington Shark, started to show the wear and tear of age. The Department of the Environment suggested that it should be repainted every nine months and not illuminated after 10:30pm it's unclear if these suggestions were followed, but a full renovation was undertaken in 2007. Even as Hain himself grew older and struggled to maintain the same enthusiasm for the sculpture that he had shown as a younger man. In his later years, as his mortgage ran out and his work prospects dwindled, Bill Hayne considered taking the shark down. As of 2016, it had been 30 years since the shark had started standing over the neighborhood, which was a long time, and he was tired. Fortunately, his son was able to buy the house from him and take over maintenance of the sculpture. He found an ally in the Oxford City Council, the same body that tried to have the shark taken down in the 1980s and 90s. The council lobbied for over a decade to get the Headington shark listed as a local heritage site, finally succeeding in 2022. Hayne didn't live to see this sadly passing away. In 2019. In his honor, gold leaf was added to one of the shark's fins. Today, the house is available as an Airbnb, so. So if you're visiting Oxford, it's entirely possible to stay underneath one of the most esoteric pieces of independent art in England. The irony is not lost on anyone. A piece of art created without permission to protest the way society is blind to the cruelties of war has become a tourist attraction. Whether that represents failure or success, though, is entirely up to you.