Rawz created Forgotten Stories Of Oxford, a Spoken Word collection which forms a walking tour of central Oxford, offering a glimpse behind the facade of a city whose name is synonymous with global elitism.

This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2025. 
Below, Rawz discusses the piece, and what lead to its creation.

Oxford is a global synonym for privilege and elitism.

It’s a city known around the world for its dreaming spires, its having educated 53% of all British Prime Ministers, and countless world leaders. Perhaps more than any other institution in the world, the University that bears the city’s name has the power to shape nations and dictate narratives. People travel from every continent on earth to walk the streets of this city, and sit beneath the shadows of its colleges.

But for many people who call the city home, the centre of Oxford is not somewhere we feel welcome. It is a place we pass through quickly, if at all. A place where the monumental architecture delivers a quiet but clear message: these spaces are not built for you.

I grew up in Oxford’s Greater Leys estate – a mid 1990s expansion of Blackbird Leys, an estate built in the 1950s to house workers of the city’s rapidly expanding car manufacturing industry. Both Leys estates acquired reputations for being “rough” before they had even finished being constructed. I grew up just a few miles south of the postcard views of central Oxford, but in a different world.

My neighbourhood ranks among the 10% most underserved wards in England. Life expectancy for men drops by 13 years within the 8 miles between my home in the far south of the city, and the more privileged wards just north of the city centre. Until 2022 I had never set foot in an Oxford University college, despite living in the city for over 30 years. To many people where I’m from, “The University” is an intangible entity that controls the city, and treats its population with indifference at best.

The centre of Oxford is a workplace, not a home. We are the retail staff, the street sweepers, the porters – the ones who never appear in the misleading “traditional” narrative, reinforced by shows like Netflix’s recent My Oxford Year which was the number 1 movie in 73 countries, with reported viewing figures of over 24.6 million.

Everyone in the movie’s trailer is white, save just one out of focus black woman in the background of one shot, while in reality Oxford is one of the UK’s most diverse cities. Not only are these narratives untrue and not representative, they compound feelings of exclusion and neglect among the city’s populace. This tale of two cities is as ancient as the almost 900 year old university, and is known locally as “the town and gown divide”.

Tourists and students flock to the city in their millions to celebrate the iconic architecture of the blood drenched ground zero of British colonialism. They want to see the place where Harry Potter was filmed, witness the stolen riches of imperialism, and drink a “cup o’ tea”. There’s walking tours of the Colleges, walking tours of the University guided by Alumni, Alice in Wonderland tours, Harry Potter tours, Inspector Morse tours, anything a TOURist could want. To me the centre of my home town often feels like a theme park… a colonial theme park.

I began to ask myself:

If Oxford now exists primarily as a tourist attraction, can I create an attraction for the people who call the city home? Could this be a way of reclaiming ownership, or at least reminding everyone that there is a city beyond the spires?

I wanted to create something that people working in the city centre could enjoy during a lunch break, an activity that kids growing up like I did – hanging out in the city centre with no money and nothing to do, could perhaps stumble across and begin to see their role in the city in a new light. Something people could pick up and put down whenever they wanted to.

I began developing Forgotten Stories of Oxford by walking around the city centre I’ve known since I was 5, and trying to get lost. I took pictures as if I was a tourist, and asked questions about street names and quirky features I’d taken for granted all my life. I entered doors I’d walked past a thousand times, climbed towers and saw views I’d never seen, of streets I’d traveled on for decades, I turned left where I’d always turned right. This methodology was surprisingly effective, and I began pulling threads on those first couple of research expeditions that later became stories in the final tour.

As I dug deeper attempting to find out more, I began connecting with elders from my community – many of whom had been mentors for me growing up, with local historians, and with academics through Oxford University’s TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities). Everyone, “townie” or “gownie”, was fascinated and excited by some part of the project. Each version of the city wanted to know stories about the other, but one side had been excluded from the exchange for centuries. I realised I was not only remapping the city, I was remapping its narrative, the way people encounter it, the way people remember it. That’s powerful.

I noticed; Alice in Wonderland, The Narnia Books, His Dark Materials – all books about traveling between parallel worlds, were all written here. I began to realise that I had become a traveller between these worlds, and I was building a new portal between them.

My research notes became a set of eleven spoken word poems, mapped to eleven locations across the city. Each poem is rooted in a physical encounter: a set of time-worn steps, unknown initials carved into bricks, a corner where a well travelled busker used to dance.

The walk invites a kind of listening that gives attention to the layers of history that lead us to what is present now, and what will be present after now. What is given to us as fact, and what has been deliberately “forgotten”. It invites us to think about what will be remembered from the time we call “ours”.

My hope is that after experiencing Forgotten Stories Of Oxford, audience members will be more inquisitive, and ready to look beyond simplistic narratives presented in any situation. I would like to think that this walking tour encourages people to question what they see, to be more ready to investigate what lies beneath the surface, and think about how our now came to be.

The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2025 will be announced around the start of 2026.