It was only my second time in Jericho when I set out to interview the owner and operations manager of Common Ground on a drizzly Thursday morning. My newcomer status felt like a heavy secret – one that seemed instantly revealed as I entered the café and all eyes turned upon me. Yet, it was more than just the projection of a guilty conscience: people were noticeably scanning my face, as if they expected to recognise me, to know me. I realised instantly that, despite its name, there was something not-so-common about the place.
In truth, I had long intended to pay the lauded study spot a visit, but a busy Oxford schedule moulds habits quickly and I’d become a Turl Street regular before you could say the word “Knoops”. Nonetheless, both fascinated by Common Ground’s origins and intent on revitalising my routine, I’d organised an interview with Eddie Whittingham and Alex Chesters. The pair immediately dispelled all sense of intrusion with the warmest of welcomes: hot chocolate on the house. We took a seat outside and began the interview:
To kick us off, I was wondering if you could each flesh out what your roles are.
Eddie: Yes, so I’m Eddie – I’m the owner. I took over the space in 2023 and I come from a design background. I’ve done work in community spaces and cafés in Oxford.
Alex: I’m Alex, I’m the operations manager. I mostly do the day-to-day running of it: arranging the events, emails, trying to plan stuff, get the right dates, start advertising and doing the rotas.
How would you describe Common Ground?
Eddie: We’re essentially a social co-working space in the daytime where students, entrepreneurs, creatives, can come and work on their projects or on their studies. In the evening, we change into a community art space where we do lots of events from live music to comedy to poetry, lots of work with student societies, and we just try and support the community the best we can really.
Eddie explains how, once home to a Barclays bank, the space was taken over in 2018 by Jake Backus and Piotr Drabick, who initially intended to start “a co-work repair shop”. Since the university-owned building had been long disused, Backus (Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College) was granted permission to open Common Ground as a pop-up. Though ownership has since changed, Eddie asserts that Drabick’s vision has remained and describes it as the fostering of a space “less lonely than your student bedroom and more community-driven than a library”.
Has Common Ground evolved in any way you didn’t expect it to since you joined?
Alex: I think the demand has definitely been a really nice surprise. I’m still getting emails from people trying to book something for June. We had June fully booked months ago!
I was looking at what you had on just this week and the list was almost endless. There was crafting, social running, life drawing exhibition, comedy night and a whole range of performances. How is it that you manage to pack in so many events?
Alex: Well, all the furniture gets moved out the way for the gigs and then put back again. So, at 9pm, everyone’s dancing around to live music; at 8am, the following morning, you’ve got people getting their coffee on the way to work. It’s also just having amazing staff, staff that like to be here. There’s different events for everyone as well, and I try to put on staff, thinking ‘oh, they’ll like this gig’ or ‘maybe they won’t want to work this gig because they’ll want to be dancing’.
I saw that you sometimes hold free events, like salsa lessons. How are you able to put those on?
Alex: We’ve kind of given up the space to people. Especially when we joined, we really wanted to open up our doors. The salsa group wants to put on something free and there’s a whole Spanish community that’s amazing to have in here. We’ve got our Common Ground Sound Project which is us trying to help new musicians or people on tour coming to Oxford. We’re trying to really reduce the overhead cost for people to put on live music because how are we going to get new artists if people can’t afford to do their first gig? So we’re really trying to be kind with it. Obviously we’re still a business and we still have to run that way but we’re trying to do our best to open up our doors as much as possible to people.
Do you know how people find you? I saw that this week you had a Costa Rican artist perform.
Eddie and Alex (in sync and very enthusiastically): Yes!
Alex: It’s actually so funny, I’m not even sure how the word is getting around. I can understand the student circles but now we’ve had three different artists from Brazil. I think obviously musicians all sort of watch each other and where they’re going to play and people think ‘oh Oxford, that’s not too far from London: that would be a great start for my tour!’ And then it looks like we’re coming up as one of the top places which is really cool.
I guess it’s a win-win for everyone: you get the music and promotion of the venue and the artists get the space.
Eddie: Yes, exactly. Hosting a wide variety of events attracts so many different kinds of social sectors in Oxford and those people all come into the café in the daytime. So putting on bigger events does increase our footfall in the café and it also helps that mingling of social groups.
Alex: I also think for the same people to be coming here during the day, using it as their library, and then coming in the evening and having fun, creates a sense of community and a sense of home. It’s also easier to go chat to people and make friends with them because they’re not all sitting at their laptops: they’re listening to live music. I think having a range of events will just keep bringing in different people. The café remains as the melting pot of all of them during the day.
Common Ground is famous for fostering the town and gown relationship, and I ask Eddie and Alex about this intersection. Alex highlights the important role of live music and explains how she often pairs bands external to Oxford, which tend to attract more of the town population, with a student act to draw in the “local student crowd”. She believes that the interaction happens naturally during the day as everyone is “doing their work whether town or gown – especially with the rise of working from home.” Eddie adds, “It’s also about creating a relaxed environment where it can happen. I think these groups do want to mix, it’s just that there aren’t really any spaces in Oxford where they can.” Colleges are closed off to most and even Alex and Eddie, both Oxford Brookes alumni, struggled to meet an Oxford University student for years.
Though the current social impact of Common Ground is evident, plans recently announced by Oxford University Development (OUD) for 25 Wellington Square, the university-owned building in which Common Ground is located, threaten its future. The plans principally outline OUD’s intent to demolish and redevelop the square into academic facilities and student accommodation.
In light of these plans, how do you hope to go forward?
Eddie: Our view is that, since the university has supported us this far and created this community, there’s an opportunity to take that further and keep lifting us up and help Common Ground thrive, trying to find alternative spots where we can be in the city, but then also having us back in when the space eventually reopens.
What has the journey been like negotiating the terms with OUD?
Eddie: When we had our first consultation, I think they were surprised by how much the community responded to their plans. Around two thirds of people mentioned Common Ground as something that needs to be preserved in the first public consultation. We’ve had a couple of meetings, we’ve met with the director of the redevelopment company and the director of the University Asset Management and they’re generally quite receptive to our ideas. We also met with their local and global engagement officer who manages social impact and we think we can help them fulfil some of their goals – the presence of grassroot music venues is something they particularly want to improve. We think there’s a possibility for a partnership where they can keep on supporting us and that contributes to their social impact.
Although the plans aren’t yet definite and, according to Eddie, obtaining approval looks like “a fairly long process”, he anticipates that they will go forward. He is consequently vying for the university’s support in Common Ground’s temporary relocation: “There are plenty of sites across the city that are sitting empty at the moment. A few university-owned buildings that are well-located but have just been empty for years. These spaces can be activators: we can create the same thing in those spaces as we have here.”
Do you know if, once Wellington Square is rebuilt, you will get your space back?
Eddie: No, we don’t know for certain. They’ve planned to put some sort of community café space in there but the process of choosing tenancy happens later on. It will take more long-term persuasion of the university but we should be there. We’ve done this whole book of testimonials called Holding Ground – you can see it on the website. There are over 100 testimonials from local people and students on why Common Ground is so important to Oxford. And then, alongside that, we’re working on a social impact report which is going to be research-led.
Was there a particular moment that made you realise the extent of Common Ground’s impact on people?
Alex: I think I definitely felt it the first time the development did a showcase of their plans a couple of doors down. That day, the café was packed, buzzing and it was quite an emotional day of people just wanting to be there, wanting to help, wanting to show up.
Eddie: Some of the testimonials are really heartfelt, quite powerful. You’ve got refugees, people from underrepresented communities that have found solace here and not really anywhere else in the city. There’s someone who’d just left a cult and found safety here.
That’s incredible. Even walking in, it’s quite a different experience to a normal café: it’s as if people are looking to see if they recognise you. It feels like a real community.
Alex and Eddie nod as if they know exactly what I’m talking about (see, it wasn’t just the guilty conscience). I then pose my final question.
How can people help Common Ground in its endeavour to secure continued support from Oxford?
Eddie: I think by just really trying to drive in that message that we’re looking for a positive relationship with the university so however they can encourage the university to understand where we’re coming from. If they know anyone who has links to the university or city council…?
He tails off suggestively and Alex and I laugh. Then, he summarises more earnestly: “We’re looking to have a presence.”
Alex mentions that, if anyone wants to reach out with their own testimonial, they are more than welcome to do so: “We’re conscious that a lot of people have thanked us in their PhDs or books or research and often they’ll come up and tell whoever’s working here ‘I just thanked you in my acknowledgements!’ but I think it would be cool to do a bit of a callout of that and see how much research and how many books are being written here.”
Eddie concludes: “Just keep coming to the space, keep engaging!”
Though it may have been my first time at Common Ground, there is no doubt about it: I, for one, shall be back.