A home with a sculpture of a shark sticking out of its roof has been made a listed building despite the owner’s protests.
The Headington Shark is among the new additions to the Oxford Heritage Asset Register as having important cultural, social or historical value.
Former BBC Radio Oxford presenter Bill Heine secured the sculpture to his roof, purposely without planning permission, in 1986.
He later found himself embroiled in a six-year planning row with the local council before he passed away in 2019.
Mr Heine’s son, Magnus Hanson-Heine, vehemently opposed the building being added to Oxford’s heritage list as it would go against his father’s original purpose for the sculpture.
“The Heritage register clearly states that listing is used as a material consideration in future planning decisions. The council have used the planning laws to supposedly ‘preserve’ a symbol of planning law defiance,” he told The Independent.
“It undermines the message of the sculpture, and in that sense it damages the artwork that a listing decision is supposedly seeking to preserve.
“You couldn’t write a more tone deaf planning decision. They don’t understand the artwork and they have done damage to a beautiful piece of the city’s cultural heritage, which is a surprisingly perverse use of the Heritage register.”
Mr Hanson-Heine explained the sculpture was created for a number of reasons, for the most part in opposition to bombing and warfare, particularly nuclear weapons.
“The other was opposition to censorship and to make the point that councillors and state bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide what kind of art the public are and aren’t allowed to see, which councils do all the time through the planning laws,” he explained.
Whilst he received a “standardised letter” from the council, he said no one actually reached out to him personally to discuss the Headington Shark being added to the list.
“They don’t give particular consideration to the owners opinion anyway, and they explicitly didn’t consider the actual intention or history of the artwork or the potential harm that this would do to the message of the sculpture,” he said.
Mr Hanson-Heine claims the move was an “exercise of power” by bureaucrats making decisions about public artwork “they know nothing about”.
“Clearly the message of the Headington Shark House still hasn’t yet gotten through.”
For more information on the shark and its history, visit www.headingtonshark.com.
