Why I snapped up the Headington shark house

I was born into a family with a slightly unusual home – it has a 25-ft fibreglass shark, designed by the sculptor John Buckley, crashing through the roof tiles.

The Headington shark house in east Oxford was already a year old when I was born, so it always seemed normal to me. It had landed out of the blue, and without planning permission, on 9 August 1986, the anniversary of the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki (and partially inspired by planes overhead on their way to the bombing of Tripoli the night the house was bought). The protest sentiment of a huge shark crashing through the roof of a quiet terraced house is hard to miss. My father felt he had “put up two fingers to bureaucracy and stood up for creativity” by commissioning the sculpture.

It took six years of legal battles with the city council, the courts and, finally, the government, until the then environment minister, Michael Heseltine, decided the shark could stay. During this process, the sculpture morphed from an unwelcome and allegedly illegal eyesore to an irreplaceable (and legal) part of the Oxfordshire skyline.

One might ask why a man can’t simply smash the roof of his house with anything he pleases. The short answer is that he can and that, where the government is concerned, “forgiveness” can take six years to get. That’s quite a nice lesson to have suspended above your house for the world to see. Those questions about the limits of state power over censorship, private property and warfare are certainly no less relevant today. The shark turned 30 last year, and over the years the house has become a symbol of Oxfordshire rather than one of peace, self-direction or nuclear disarmament. People get used to things, even pretty extraordinary things.

On 26 August last year, I bought the shark house. At the time, I had no intention of buying property, least of all in Oxford, but Dad had remortgaged the house in 2007 just before the first leg of the financial crash hit, and the bank was threatening to repossess the property. It looked increasingly likely that the shark would be “tidied up” so the property could be sold off as a regular terraced house. This much-loved piece of art might be destroyed by another set of bureaucrats unable to deal with something that wouldn’t fit a standardised form.

I couldn’t allowed that to happen. In the end, I agreed to preserve this piece of history and join the fight for its survival. The shark house is safe for now.