The Shark House is a large double fronted Victorian property with four double bedrooms and four bathrooms. We are located in central Headington, close to Oxford city centre, hospitals, Oxford & Brookes Universities and plenty of shops, cafes and banks with in a minutes walk. We also have a 25 foot shark in our roof! Hello. I'm Magnus Hanson-Heine, the home-owner of the Headington Shark House. The Shark House consists of a 25ft long fibreglass and steel sculpture of a shark, formally titled “Untitled 1986”, crashing through the roof of an otherwise average house on a quiet residential street in rural Oxford. The sculpture was conceived of by my late father Bill Heine and sculptor John Buckley, created in secret, and erected without planning permission to the shock of many on 9th August 1986, starting what ended up being a six-year long battle to keep it. While the initial reaction to the shark was heavily polarized, the sculpture quickly gained a strong national and international following, with people coming from all over the country to speak in its defence at various public forums. The battle with the council progressively escalated through the courts and finally all the way up to the national government, where the secretary for the environment Michael Heseltine finally made a personal visit and ruled that it should be allowed to stay. In defence of the shark staying, Heseltine’s planning inspector, Peter Macdonald, made an official ruling that has gained prominent status among town planners for its defence of public art: “In this case it is not in dispute that the shark is not in harmony with its surroundings, but then it is not intended to be in harmony with them.... The council is understandably concerned about precedent here. The first concern is simple: proliferation with sharks (and heaven knows what else) crashing through roofs all over the city. This fear is exaggerated. In the five years since the shark was erected, no other examples have occurred…

I have been managing short lets in London and Oxford since 2015.

Headington is a buzzing community with fantastic connections to London and Oxford and a farmers market on Saturday mornings.