Shutters go up on Karl Marx's local

Received wisdom among dons and dossers, who for more than a century have frequented the Wharf House pub, in Butterwycke Place - one of only two buildings to survive the horrible sixties and seventies redevelopment of St Ebbes - is that Karl Marx used to drink there.

True or untrue? I don't know. All I can say is that I, for one, never did. All my drinking life (some 40 years) I meant to visit the lovely-looking old place, with its late Georgian facade forlornly overlooking a barrage of merciless traffic streaming down Thames Street; but never got round to it.

And now it's too late; the pub has closed down. Someone has inserted metal shutters, sadly reminiscent of the pennies Victorians used to put into the eye sockets of dead people, over its stately sash windows.

But what sort of scenes did those windows overlook before the poor old pub found itself isolated on its hellish, inaccessible jetty, sticking out into rushing traffic? Imagine water instead of road; boats instead of cars.

Wonderful how names reflect history. The Wharf House was once really situated on a proper, watery wharf: Friars Wharf by name. The Wharf House first appears in records as a pub, Dr Malcolm Graham, of the Local Studies Centre at Oxford Central Library, kindly informed me, in 1871 - though it may well have been one long before that.

Friars Wharf protruded out into a rectangular basin, or pool, into which barges turned from the Thames to be loaded and unloaded.

The name of a nearby development of houses on the other side of Thames Street from the now closed pub, Shirelake, reflects the fact that the river used to form the boundary between Oxfordshire and Berkshire until the late 19th century.

The wharf was called Friars Wharf because it occupied a site near the medieval friary owned by the Blackfriars (as reflected in the name of a road not far from Shirelake).

Writing in the website The Oxford Guide, a former Wharf regular enthuses: "the pub is the best in Oxford." He adds that at closing time the landlord's question: "Haven't you lot got homes to go to?" had a hollow ring, since many of them had not. Even now, homeless people may be seen sitting outside the boarded-up pub at the tables and chairs provided - but without their beer.

The barge basin was filled in shortly after the railway came to Oxford. The first station was across Folly Bridge. The Christ Church dons insisted it went there, and that a toll be levied for crossing the bridge, so as to make it harder for undergraduates to get to the fleshpots of London. The tollhouse, now a sweet shop, is still there.

As for the St Ebbe's development: at least were spared a hotel that was once planned. Vast legs of concrete were built for it to stand upon back in the seventies, the last folly before Folly Bridge, until they were removed to make way for housing.

I am told that pubs are closing down at the rate of one a day, but how I wish I had visited the Wharf before it was too late. A colleague of mine, here at the paper, feels much the same about the Elm Tree in Cowley Road, with its slightly Lutyens-esque architecture. It has just closed down, too.

But then I suppose Shakespeare might have felt much the same about the Crown Inn, once at number 3 Cornmarket, where he used to stay on his way to Stratford once a year. Then there was the Catherine Wheel, which once occupied a site now containing part of Balliol, where the conspirators plotted the Gunpowder Plot. Or the Swyndelstock, on the corner of St Aldates and Queen Street, where a row between the innkeeper and a student sparked off the Scolastica's Day riots in 1355. The list goes on.

As for Karl Marx: I admit that I spent far too long looking for proof that he came to Oxford. I even rang the archivist at Christ Church, since one website placed him there, and the college is, after all, just down the road from the pub. What fun it would be if, say, he had met Lewis Carroll! Any information gratefully received.