SUMMERTOWN is not just any shopping street in Oxford: it’s the essence of north Oxford, where exclusive schools rub shoulders with the city’s most expensive houses. In fact, it’s a residential area, one mile square, and a shopping street. Between St Giles, the beautiful boulevard leading out of Oxford’s city centre, and Summertown, two miles north, you’ll find the city’s most expensive residential property.

Predominantly Victorian redbrick, most of north Oxford came into being as a result of the revolutionary decision by the university to permit college fellows to marry and live in real houses, as opposed to rooms in college.

Well, one thing leads to another and soon schools expanded or were created. North Oxford now has some of the best in the country. The private ones include the Dragon and Summer Fields prep schools, St Edward’s (“Teddies”) and Oxford High School for Girls; good state schools include Cherwell comprehensive and St Philip and St James primary. It’s a wonderful place to bring up children, with everything on the doorstep, the twin lungs of University Parks on one side and Port Meadow on the other.

And why trek to the tawdry shops of the city centre when you can get almost everything you need in Summertown? Unless you’re desperate to hang out in the cavernous depths of Virgin Megastore, you can forget Oxford’s retail arrangements, bookshops excepted. Many people go to Cheltenham or London for their Christmas shopping rather than take a brief (but expensive) bus ride into town.

There’s a wonderful organic butcher’s at the top of Summertown that also sells local fruit and veg, three chemists, four posh frock shops, four charity shops, lots of nice restaurants, a bookshop, an art gallery, and even the BBC (Radio Oxford) for all your broadcasting needs.

Summertown did not alter much until recently. North Oxford continues to shelter dons, but they are a dwindling species. How can it be otherwise when university salaries stalled as property prices spiralled up? Even after the 2006 pay review, a lecturer of 11 years’ standing will earn £43,000, a professor maybe £55,000.

As for house prices, you’d be lucky to get a three-bedroom house in Summertown itself for less than £500,000; a period one would cost far more. Even the new houses west of Summertown, by the canal, go for £550,000. Savills says that the most expensive houses in central/north Oxford, those between St Giles and Summertown, sell for up to £4 million, and that houses in Summertown sell for up to £1.1 million.

So you are less likely to meet the professor’s wife on her bicycle, basket in front, in a sludge-coloured skirt. In her place steps the wife of a bloke who heads up a telecoms company or a bonus-happy banker, migrated from London. They have bought the sprawling Edwardian semi from the professor and spent a fortune on it. Not for them the dingy, draughty bedrooms, the vinyl-floored kitchen, the weedy garden. Now it has handmade double-glazed sash windows, standard bay trees each side of the front door, and a Bulthaup kitchen ordered from the firm’s Summertown showroom.

What has happened to the professor’s house is mirrored by changes in Summertown’s shops. Chief of them was the advent of M&S Simply Food in 2002, a year after a Laura Ashley Home Furnishings opened. The other two supermarkets leapt into renovation mode: the Coop put down a new floor and Somerfields transformed itself – although perhaps not for the better.

You could have foreseen M&S would do well, but it has surpassed all expectations. Chris Lampert, its manager, says that for an outlet of its size it’s in the top five in the country. And for once we’re not talking about the university.

FACTFILE

Property in north Oxford has risen in price by 20 per cent in the past 18 months, Savills in Summertown says.

The average property price in the area (postcode OX2) is £374,255.

The average price of a two-bedroom property locally is £287,577, compared with the national average of £187,894. Figures from www.mouseprice.com.

Just over half – 50.9 per cent – of the local population have a degree.

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