as is its contemporary function. One thing to which Wood’s
records nonetheless attest is the seclusion of the place. It was
too far from the busy town centre for a drowning figure to
be spotted easily, or for help to be fetched in time to rescue
them.
Leaping forward to the nineteenth-century, the earliest
Ordnance Survey map of Oxford from 1876 similarly places
Parson’s Pleasure on the outskirts; in fact, precisely on the
eastern boundary of the city’s jurisdiction as formed by the
river. The nearest landmarks are remarkably varied, from a
large Civil War ‘Intrenchment’, to a ‘Female Penitentiary,’ and
even a skating rink. The bathing place itself is skirted with
foliage, as it is today, and possesses already the series of small
buildings - changing cubicles and a keeper’s office - that later
appear in photographs.
The map also indicates that the modern name for the place
had been quite firmly established by this point. As with the
Cambridge green, Parker’s Piece, the name’s sing-song quality
seems in itself to invite nostalgia, and yet has the ring as much
of euphemism as of nursery rhyme; traditionally, Parsons were
forbidden from ‘taking pleasure’ - in one old-fashioned sense
of the term, at least. ‘Pleasure’, in this context - between the
streets of the city and the fields of the countryside - also
suggests the ‘pleasure garden’, the quiet hortus conclusus to
which people could escape on a hot summer’s day.
2
It is this aspect of the place - its identity as an escape or idyll
- that often comes to the fore when it appears in writing or
visual art. In one of the early short stories of Rudyard Kipling,
set in a Central Asian desert, a delirious acquaintance of the
narrator’s refers to Parson’s Pleasure as a kind of hangover
cure, using the contemporary nickname, ‘Loggerhead’: ‘I- I- I’m
a bit screwed,’ he says, ‘but a dip in Loggerhead will put me
right again’ - on which the narrator muses, ‘Loggerhead was
six thousand weary miles away [...] It was strange to hear all
the old names, on a May night, among the horses and camels
of the Sultan Caravanserai.’ In Kipling, then, the bathing place
becomes an escape not just from the hangover, or the bustle
of the city and university, but from the present itself, into a
world and nomenclature of memory.
Parson’s Pleasure plays a similar role in an elegiac poem
by Gascoi