John and Priscilla Tolkien wrote that no. 20
was as much loved for its garden as for the house. John and Ronald worked at landscaping and redesigning the garden over many years, turning the rather decrepit tennis court at the top into a vegetable garden: an important asset during the war years that were to follow. Over the years we lived there the trees planted by the Blackwells grew almost to forest height. In a side garden, Edith had an aviary, in which budgerigars, canaries and other exotic birds lived during the summer months, being taken indoors for the winter. In war-time, the aviary was turned into a hen-house …. [The Tolkien Family Album, p. 55]
A photograph of the hens at 20 Northmoor Road is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 72. Although the house has no architectural significance, in 2004 it was given protected status as a Grade II listed building, on the basis of Tolkien’s importance as an author.
In 1933 Tolkien and his son John built a trellis in front of 20 Northmoor Road to at least partly screen their garden from the view of passers-by. In spring 1940 Tolkien drew a picture of the garden, with daffodils and a flowering Victoria Plum tree (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 3).
On 14 March 1947 the Tolkiens moved to a small house at 3 Manor Road owned by Merton College, of which Tolkien became a fellow in 1945. By this time, with only Priscilla among the children still living with her parents, 20 Northmoor Road had become too large and too costly to maintain. But in Manor Road Tolkien and Edith ‘found both house and garden cramped and claustrophobic after the spaciousness’ they had previously enjoyed (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74). Tolkien described their Manor Road home in a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin as ‘a minute house near the centre of this town’ (5 May 1947, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). Manor Road runs east from St Cross Road towards the Cherwell, past the English Faculty Library and the Law Library. For lack of space Tolkien no longer had a proper study: he later remarked to his Aunt *Jane Neave that he had typed out the whole of *The Lord of the Rings twice, ‘mostly on my bed in the attic of the tiny terrace-house to which war had exiled us from the house in which my family grew up’ (8–9 September 1962, Letters, pp. 321–2). A photograph of Tolkien, Priscilla, *Christopher, and Edith in the garden of 3 Manor Road in 1949 is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74. Austin and *Katharine Farrer were neighbours at 7 Manor Road.
In May 1950 Tolkien, Edith, and Priscilla moved not far away to a larger Merton College house at 99 Holywell Street which dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘The house had a small step up from the street and lay back at an angle …. Its small garden contained a hawthorn tree that attracted nuthatches and tree creepers, and the high wall at the back, dividing it from the gardens of New College, was part of the medieval wall of the city’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74; photographs, pp. 74, 75). Tolkien again had room for a study, and could see his postgraduate students at home as well as in college. But by now Holywell Street, connecting Parks Road (near its intersection with Broad Street) and St Cross Road (near its intersection with Longwall Street), had become a major traffic route. On 24 October 1952 Tolkien wrote to *Rayner Unwin that his ‘charming house has become uninhabitable – unsleepable-in, unworkable-in, rocked, racked with noise, and drenched with fumes. Such is modern life. Mordor in our midst’ (Letters, p. 165).
On 30 March 1953 Tolkien and Edith moved to 76 Sandfield Road in Headington, east of the centre of Oxford; Priscilla by now had taken her degree and had left Oxford for Bristol. Holywell Street was abandoned in part on doctor’s orders: Edith’s increasing ill health required that she live in ‘a house on high dry soil and in the quiet’ (Tolkien, letter to Rayner Unwin, 24 March 1953, Letters, p. 166). Humphrey Carpenter describes 76 Sandfield Road in Biography as it looked in spring 1967: it was a long way down ‘a residential street of two-storey brick houses, each with its tidy front garden …. The house is painted white and is partially screened by a tall fence, a hedge, and overhanging trees.’ One entered through an arched gate – a photograph of Tolkien and Edith at the gate is reproduced in Biography, pl. 13 – and along a short path between rose bushes. The entrance hall was ‘small and tidy and contains nothing that one would not expect in the house of a middle-class elderly couple. *W.H. Auden, in an injudicious remark quoted in the newspapers, has called the house “hideous”, but that is nonsense. It is simply ordinary and suburban’ (Biography, pp. 3–4).
The house was small; it could not hold comfortably all of Tolkien’s books, most of which he had kept at Merton College but which on his retirement in 1959 he was obliged to remove. When he had filled his upstairs study–bedroom, he converted the (unoccupied) garage into a library-office. Humphrey Carpenter described the latter:
The shelves are crammed with dictionaries, works on etymology and philology, and editions of texts in many languages, predominant among which are Old and Middle English; but there is also a section devoted to translations of The Lord of the Rings …; and the map of his invented ‘Middle-earth’ is pinned to the window-ledge. On the floor is a very old portmanteau full of letters, and on the desk are ink-bottles, nibs and pen-holders, and two typewriters. The room smells of books and tobacco-smoke. [Biography, p. 4]
Tolkien himself wrote about it to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer on 8 February 1967:
May I say that it is not a ‘study’, except in domestic slang …. It was a hastily contrived necessity, when I was obliged to relinquish my room in college and provide a store for what I could preserve of my library. Most of the books of value have since been removed, and the most important contents are the rows of orderly files kept by my part-time secretary. She is the only regular user of the room. I have never written any literary matter in it. [Letters, p. 373]
Since there were only two rooms on the ground floor besides the kitchen, Tolkien converted a smaller bedroom into a study where he did his writing. (Under later ownership, the property was much altered and modernized. When it was offered for sale in 2017 it was described as containing five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and six reception rooms.)
The chief disadvantage of 76 Sandfield Road was that it was almost two miles from Oxford centre, a long journey for Tolkien while he was still the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature – and the same for family and friends to visit Sandfield Road. The size of the house was also a problem, demanding too many domestic chores of people in advanced years, even with daily help. Nor did the quiet that Tolkien and Edith found there in 1953 last more than a few years. As Tolkien wrote to Christopher Bretherton on 16 July 1964:
Sandfield Road was a cul-de-sac when I came here, but was soon opened at the bottom end, and became for a time an unofficial lorry by-pass, before Headley Way was completed. Now it is a car-park for the field of ‘Oxford United’ at the top end. While the actual inhabitants do all that radio, tele, dogs, scooters, buzzbikes, and cars of all sizes but the smallest, can do to produce noise from early morn to about 2 a.m. In addition in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable …. [Letters, pp. 344–5]
In mid-July 1968 Tolkien and Edith moved to a bungalow in *Poole, near *Bournemouth. Soon after Edith died in November 1971 Tolkien began to look for a place in Oxford, and in mid-January 1972 Christopher Tolkien wrote on behalf of his father to the Warden of Merton to ask if the College had any housing available. The Warden called a special meeting of Merton’s Governing Body, which unanimously voted that Tolkien should be invited to become a residential fellow. In this manner he was offered a set of rooms at 21 Merton Street, a road which runs south and west from the High Street past Merton College