Архивные снимки раскрывают историю молодежных лагерей при церкви Святого Луки в Оксфорде

Many youth groups in Oxford took advantage of warm summer days to enjoy activities at Hill End Camp. Reader Pat Ross has found in her family archives this picture of St Luke’s Junior Guild there in the 1950s. The guild was attached to St Luke’s Church in Oxford Road, Cowley. Mrs Ross, of Bowness Avenue, Headington, has identified some of those in the photograph – Mr, Mrs and Arthur Tipler, Ruth and Roy King and Father John Bettan and three of his children. READ MORE: Hickory's Smokehouse opens after 'test run' night As we have reported, the site near Oxford is now known as Hill End outdoor education centre and is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. It is thought to have hosted more than a million visitors since it opened in 1926. Among them was Margaret Trinder, formerly of Cowley, who sent in a picture of her and her friends from Highfield youth club at Headington in the 1950s (Memory Lane, May 18). She recalled: “We came on a lorry. I remember being bitten by a creature. I had a bump on my head and when I got home, my mother thought I had fallen off the lorry.” Her husband Alan also visited Hill End as a boy in 1944. He remembered the “strange accents” of boys from the North and “peculiar food” - he and a friend tipped one breakfast into a ditch. On his second visit in the 1950s as a teenager with the Civil Defence youth club, there was a new interest - girls. The girls were in a separate part of the high dormitory and the barrier between them and the boys didn’t stretch to the ceiling. The gap was filled with barbed wire. Alan admitted that the effort to keep boys and girls apart was “not always successful”. St Luke’s Church owed its existence to Lord Nuffield, creator of the Cowley car industry. He provided the land in Oxford Road and paid for most of the building, which opened in 1938. With Lord Nuffield as its benefactor and being so close to the Cowley car factories, it became known as the ‘car workers’ parish church’. The church was declared redundant in the late 1990s. It now houses the Oxfordshire History Centre, with thousands of public records and historical documents.