In Memory of the Englishman Who Kept a Shark on His Roof, New Yorker, May 2019
Article for the New Yorker investigating the backstory of the ‘Headington Shark’
First published 5 May 2019
Extract
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.