The 25ft shark on a suburban roof council jobsworths couldn’t harpoon! Homeowner commissioned a fibreglass sculpture and installed it with the help of a crane to express his anger in 1986 – as Oxford City Council now fights to give it listed status
We all develop different coping mechanisms when awful events unfolding around the world suddenly seem too much.
Some of us maybe shout and scream at the 10 o’clock news, or join protest marches. Others have a little cry and pour an even stiffer drink than normal.
But when global uncertainty pressed rather too hard on him back in 1986, the late Bill Heine found a novel way to show his concern.
He commissioned a 25ft, 30st (200kg), fibreglass sculpture of a great white shark.
Then, with the help of a crane, installed it, head first in the roof of his terraced house in the leafy Oxford suburb of Headington one morning at dawn.
It was, he used to say, his way of expressing how someone can feel ‘totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of . . . anger and desperation . . .’
So for him, back then, it said something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl, Nagasaki and also, apparently, the long dark shadow of artistic censorship.
The shark was certainly dramatic — sunk to its gills in the tiled roof, tail-fin gleaming in the early morning August sunshine, as if hurled from the sky.
In 1986, the late Bill Heine commissioned a 25ft, 30st (200kg), fibreglass sculpture of a great white shark. Then, with the help of a crane, installed it, head first in the roof of his terraced house in the leafy Oxford suburb of Headington one morning at dawn
A cataclysmic explosion above, as below, the milkman did his rounds and residents pruned their roses on New High Street.
Naturally, it caused quite a stir.
Not just among the neighbours, who were rather startled to wake up one morning to see the large creature impaled in the roof. ‘Well, all I can say is that it wasn’t there last night!’ reported the late June Whitehouse, who lived opposite.
Needless to say, Oxford City Council went bananas.
First, they tried to get rid of it on the grounds it was dangerous to the public. When that failed, they claimed it was an illegal ‘development’ and tried, unsuccessfully, to have it moved to the local swimming pool.
And when, in 1990, Bill submitted retrospective planning permission for ‘retention of a public sculpture’, they fought bitterly for four years until, in an extraordinary ruling that has gained legendary status among planners, he won.
And there the shark — officially named Untitled 1986 — has been ever since. Tail leaning towards the road, front end smashing through the roof, shining slightly when the sun comes out.
Heine (right) with the shark’s sculptor, John Buckley (left) after fitting the now-legendary artwork
So it feels rather ironic that, nearly 30 years on and in a spectacular U-turn, members of the City Council are now trying to get the shark listed as an important piece of heritage, which would prevent it from being altered or demolished.
However, Bill’s only son, Magnus Hanson Heine, who now owns both the shark and the house — which he runs as a quirky Airbnb — is not at all happy about this.
‘It seems to me that the move misses the whole point of the shark, of everything it stood for,’ he says. ‘We’re in a bit of a weird position. We could see this as a lovely acknowledgement, but it’s strange that the council could force you to keep it, just as they tried to force you to remove it.
‘Dad never wanted councillors to be deciding for the public what kind of art they should or shouldn’t be seeing. He felt very, very strongly about it.’
And Bill Heine — an American who moved to Oxford as an 18-year-old student and loved his adopted city so much that he never went home —had strong views on many things. Everything from music to marriage (he didn’t believe in it) and the joys of hitchhiking.
In fact, he met Magnus’s mum through her then-husband, whom he met while hitchhiking. ‘They were always a bit vague about the details,’ says Magnus.
He was obsessed with films — if not Jaws. ‘He was never a fan of the film and didn’t particularly care for sharks, either,’ says Magnus.
After completing his law degree at Balliol College, Bill ran two very cool cinemas, had his own phone-in talk show on Radio BBC Oxford, a column in the Oxford Mail and was instantly recognisable with his luxuriant moustache and colourful wardrobe.
Bill Heine (pictured), who died in 2019, installed the rooftop sculpture in secret without permission in 1986 beginning a six-year planning row with the authorities
‘He was a force of nature, with a very strong sense of personal style,’ says Magnus. ‘He’d spend money on experiences and fun, not practicalities and when he wanted to do something there was no stopping him. He loved this house, he loved his shark and he really relished the battle with the council.’
The plot was hatched in early 1986 when Bill and his artist pal John Buckley were sharing a bottle of wine in the street outside the house.
Bill was increasingly twitchy about political events — on the day he’d bought the house, America had bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya. Suburban streets like his had been flattened in North Africa without warning.
Buckley, who lived nearby, was just back from a sailing trip in the Pacific where he’d spent far too much time imagining what it would be like to be attacked by a shark.
Together, perhaps fuelled by the wine, they decided the image of a shark was an apt metaphor for bombs. Bill suggested popping one over the front door, to which Buckley promptly replied, ‘Let’s just stick it through the roof!’ And so they did.
It took three months for Buckley and a small team of volunteers to construct the fish from fibreglass in a local chicken shed.
It was originally to have been installed on August 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb by the Americans on Hiroshima. But it wasn’t finished until three days later, which turned out to be the anniversary of Nagasaki, and they agreed the ninth worked just as well.
While Bill did alert some of his neighbours by saying: ‘I’ve done something a bit controversial — make sure you’re up early to see,’ he didn’t tell them quite what.
So, bleary-eyed at 6am, they were staggered to see a headless shark suspended from a crane.
‘My first thought was that he would get in trouble for having the crane parked there. I thought a traffic warden would come,’ said Anne Whitehouse, 18 at the time, in an 2019 interview with The New Yorker. ‘Quite soon I realised he probably hadn’t sought any kind of permission at all.’
Buckley and Bill then spent the rest of the morning on the roof celebrating with a bottle of champagne as the locals scratched their heads.
‘It was very polarising at the start,’ says Magnus. ‘A lot of people did not want it in their back yard.’
There were mutterings about house prices and lowering the class of the area. There was a petition to have it removed — though allegations of foul play swirled when several members of a local retirement community insisted they’d been pressured into signing.
But quickly, the madness of the ‘shark house’ caught on.
The Arts Council backed Bill, local estate agents turned the sculpture into a landmark and the head of the Modern Art Oxford gallery said to remove it would be a tragedy.
It’s hard to gauge which annoyed the local authority more — the shark itself, Bill’s flagrant disregard for rules and regulations, or the burgeoning support it attracted.
They were also worried about a floodgate of bizarre installations dotting the skyline amid Oxford’s gleaming spires. As Brian Hook, a local councillor and architect, put it: ‘If the appellant got away with it, why not others? Sharks could be followed by Mickey Mouse, vampires, flashing lights, etc.’
But eventually, after six years of legal wrangling, the Department of the Environment (run by Sir Michael Heseltine at the time) told the council to stop being so dull and unimaginative, declared that the extraordinary contrast of the shark and the suburban street was the point of it, and ruled in Bill’s favour.
Mr Hanson-Heine, a quantum chemist, said if it was given listed status it would defeat the purpose of the sculpture, which was to ‘protest against planning restrictions and censorship’
As Heseltine’s appointed planning inspector, Peter Macdonald, put it so beautifully: ‘Any system of control must make some space for the dynamic, the unexpected and the downright quirky, or we shall all be the poorer for it. I believe that this is one case where a little vision and imagination is appropriate.’
Junior planning minister, Tony Baldry, couldn’t have agreed more, emphasising that the purpose of planning control was not to ‘enforce a boring and mediocre uniformity on the built environment’.
Heseltine himself concluded that the fear of ‘proliferation, with sharks (and Heaven knows what else) crashing through roofs all over the city’ was unfounded.
Meanwhile, for Magnus, who was born in 1987, the year after the shark was installed, there was nothing unusual about his home.
‘Weirdly, it never really came up,’ he says. ‘I was just a kid. I thought it was normal to have a shark on your roof. It wasn’t as if it was shark-themed inside.
‘The only clues inside were two hatches in the ceiling — one to the roof and one to the actual shark, which was in a sort of tank.’
Outside, of course, it was unmissable and as the years passed — particularly after the judgment, it garnered cult status. Tourists from all round the world arrived to take photos, marvel at its surreal appearance and toast its madness. Coach companies would add it to their City of Oxford tours.
A one-off Lego set of the Headington Shark house was designed but, sadly, never went on sale as it would have breached Lego’s ban on political content.
Meanwhile, June Whitehouse, who had once so loathed it — perhaps in shock and confusion —decided the shark was ‘unique and brilliant’ and became the self-appointed editor-in-chief of the Headington ‘Sharkive’ — a vast collection of photographs and press clippings, kept in 11 folders.
How the Great White made waves in Oxford
August 1986 – Great white shark erected in New High Street, Headington
1990 – Oxford city councillors refused retrospective planning permission
1992 – Secretary of state for the environment Michael Heseltine gets behind calls to keep the shark
2017 – Calls began for it to be officially listed with Oxford Heritage Asset Register and English Heritage
These included references to a financial services advertisement designed by M&C Saatchi and featuring a photograph of the house with the caption ‘Freedom to find the mortgage that’s right for you’, a mention of the Headington shark in a Czech school textbook, and its appearance on the cover of a book, Ben Le Vay’s Eccentric Britain.
There were also detailed records and photos of the shark’s epic birthday parties, thrown by Bill, to which he invited the entire street.
One night, a group of particularly intrepid Venture Scouts even camped out on the roof beside it.
‘Health and safety was clearly non-existent back in the day!’ says Magnus. ‘And I had to repair the roof afterwards!’ To be fair, by 2010, the whole of the house, shark included, was in need of an urgent repair job.
Bill was out of work, was unable to service the mortgage, in poor health and, by then, mostly living with Magnus’s mother in her house nearby.
The bushes were overgrown, the windows filthy and the shark, once so strong and gleaming, looked sad and liverish, paint peeling, gills clogged up with bird droppings and other detritus.
Even neighbours who had embraced it were losing patience.
‘It was in a state for a long time, there was bird poo all over it and pigeons living in it,’ says Annette Hack, who had lived on New High Street for more than 30 years.
Which is when Magnus took on the mortgage, smartened up the house and, in 2018, paid for Buckley to restore the shark to its former glory. A special touch was added in Bill’s honour — a dab of gold leaf to the tip of the fin, that catches the sun — ‘to send him up to Heaven’.
Bill died the following year.
This week, his shark was once again looking rather splendid and the neighbours were thrilled to see the coachloads of tourists back, slowing down at the end of the road to have a look.
‘It’s really cool,’ says Joe Pelling, 22. ‘Nowhere else has one! We all love it.’
But of course they do! It’s a madcap triumph of eccentricity over bureaucracy — look carefully and its vast tail is almost flapping in delight.
No wonder the Heine family can’t countenance the thought of it being constrained by dreary planning laws, no matter how well meaning.
Visit airbnb.co.uk/rooms/31345904 to book the house
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