If you're looking for a home to rent in the Oxford area, you might be interested to know that Headington's shark house is available to let.
The property, which features a 7.5m/25ft fibreglass shark embedded head-first in the roof, is being advertised at £519 a week, or £2,250 a month.
The three-bedroom house on New High Street has recently been refurbished and letting agents Scott Fraser describe it as a "period cottage with stylish modern interiors forming part of a famous city landmark".
The Headington shark appeared in August 1986, on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
The owner of the house, Bill Heine, who commissioned the sculpture, said: "The shark was to express someone feeling totally impotent and ripping a hole in their roof out of a sense of impotence and anger and desperation… It is saying something about CND, nuclear power, Chernobyl and Nagasaki."
Oxford City Council attempted to have it taken down, firstly on grounds of safety and then due to the fact that it hadn’t given planning permission for the sculpture.
But an appeal was made to the Secretary of State for the Environment (then Michael Heseltine), and Heseltine’s Inspector Peter Macdonald recommended that the shark should be allowed to stay.
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