Oxford gets an extra week of summer this year.

Brits start shaking their heads and saying sadly, “The nights are drawing in,” as soon as it’s August, and to most people the Bank Holiday on the last Monday in the month brings the summer to an end.  (The holiday isn’t “for” anything, as I explain to Yanks who seemed a bit puzzled by the concept of a Bank Holiday, except to get a day off work – there isn’t another holiday until Christmas.)

But in Oxford summer isn’t really over until the St Giles Fair has been and gone.  It isn’t clear when fair people, travelling the surrounding counties through the season, first began to come together in Oxford for an end of summer celebration but there are references to the Fair, which celebrates St Giles Day, as early as the 17th century.  Year after year the fair people return, with each ride or stall occupying the same spot it has for decades or more.  The carousel of horses, built in 1895, is always the first ride.

St Giles is a wide section of street in central Oxford, lined with plane trees, with the Martyrs’ Memorial at one end and St Giles Church at the other.  On the two days of the Fair traffic is diverted from all approaching streets and the area is taken over by dodgems, waltzers, ghost trains, flying elephants, galloping horses, swing boats, fun houses, baby roundabouts and a tall wooden helter skelter.  There are rows of trailers selling hotdogs, chips, toffee apples and candy floss (cotton candy).  The sound of the parents shouting to children over the noise of kerosene engines is almost deafening and the air is choked with the engines’ smoke.  Metallic balloons bob above the heads of teenagers carrying giant stuffed animals.  By 9 pm it is almost impossible to move except with the flow of the crowd.

The Oxford historian Jan Morris described it thus in 1965 and it is not very different today:

The annual junket called St Giles’ Fair… is an inexorable sort of festivity — in September 1914 they tried to cancel it, but the Home Secretary himself admitted that he was powerless to do so. The whole wide street of St Giles is closed for it. For these two days of the year the University Parks and Christ Church meadows, the two main open spaces of the city, are closed to the public. Traffic is diverted, business is disrupted, the night is gaudy with neon, and all among the plane trees there proliferate the side shows, caravans and pulsing generators of the showmen.

It is the most boisterous of Oxford traditions, the profits of which go partly to the city and partly to the college of St John’s, the local landowner; and it brings together in an atmosphere of unnatural intensity every type and kind of Oxford citizen. The academics go with their burbling children, eating iced lollipops and arguing the toss with indulgent showmen in piping cultured accents. The factory families go, trailing balloons and sweet papers, and hugging flowery vases they have won at shooting galleries. The farmers go, stumping stoically through the hubbub with kind wives in blue hats…The parish clergy go, from a sense of boyish duty, and the weedy louts go, to stand around in bow-legged moronic cliques, licking candy floss, and the shop-girls go, to let their skirts fly on the Big Dipper. Every degree is represented there, from the exquisite patrician to the grubbiest slut in carpet slippers: and flushed from their normal habitats like this, thrown together between the Bingo stalls and the Man-Eating Rat, they always seem to me larger, finer or more awful than life… St Giles’s Fair is like a city with its masks torn off, seen with a flushed clarity, and it makes you wonder how such contrasts can ever be reconciled. It is sure to end, you feel, like all the worst dreams, in a scream, a cold sweat or a blackout.

Oxford, however, is old, and experienced at the game. By Wednesday morning all those stalls and roundabouts have miraculously disappeared, and the scholars, the charge-hands, the oafs and the parsons are restored to their blurred and unalarming selves.

It is certainly true that I always meet someone I know at the Fair.

The St Giles Fair is held the first Monday and Tuesday after the first Sunday in September, so it’s late this year, and summer gets to linger a little longer in Oxford.

Edited to add:  I attempted to simplify the rules for when the St Giles Fair is held and a reader has reminded me that in Oxford nothing is simple.  So I should state that my rule doesn’t quite work.  By statute the Fair cannot be held on the following Monday and Tuesday if St Giles Day (the 1st of September) is on a Sunday.  In that case it is held the second Monday and Tuesday.

Got that?