Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, by James Attlee

Oxford's supposedly dreaming spires have been committed to print so often that you'd have thought there'd be nothing we don't know about the city now. Yet James Attlee shows otherwise with a book about the last part of Oxford that remains colourful, wild, unpredictable and, for the moment, untouched by the dead hand of "regeneration".

Its subject, the Cowley Road, features in none of the bus tours or tourist guides, and not many of the countless novels or poems about this city. It is a ramshackle, multicultural mélange, the old track through the marshes between Oxford and Cowley village, now home to a mix of races and religions, strung with halal butchers, flotation centres, porn shops and pawn brokers, Chinese herbalists, Caribbean fishmongers, Russian grocers, pubs and mosques.

It's my neighbourhood, and I thought I knew it pretty well. But Isolarion has made me think, not just about local history and the hidden everyday, but about religion and philosophy, democracy and social change. Attlee's aim is to make a pilgrimage: "Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?" His itinerary will be along the Cowley Road, sampling its wares and talking to locals.

His journey along this straight road is, however, far from linear. He can't help himself: diverting down sidetracks that might lead to the site of the old leper hospital, say, or the Oxford workhouse, or into discussions about the history of pilgrimage or the significance of kerbstones. Along the way, he brushes up against the gentrification of this most ungentle of areas: the fancy friends who want to replace the legendary local baker with one that sells focaccia; the rent rises; the "upmarket" bars. Money and hyper-mobility are threatening this most mobile of communities with the encroachment of the clone town.

If it comes, a living demonstration of that much-debated "multicultural" ideal will disappear beneath a tide of Subways and Starbucks. Perhaps this should be no surprise: for centuries, east Oxford has been an embarrassing family secret to those who prefer the medieval sterility of the tourist images: "The east was a place of mission, populated by heathens to convert, the unseen territory to which servants and tradesmen returned at the end of the working day."

It still is, and, through it, Attlee captures the essence of this city better than any tour bus ever could.

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