I moved to Oxford in 1979, when I was 22. It’s where I’ve lived, and worked, for most of my life. My aim as a writer is to chronicle the times we live in, but I have not set a novel in the city I inhabit, despite all the material a realist depends upon that is in abundance all around me.

A facile explanation for this is that familiarity is deadening. The truth, however, is that I’ve not written about Oxford for the simple reason that it was not a real place for me. Oxford was a dream city, a city of the mind, a large proportion of its inhabitants engaged in intellectual speculation. Its energy was not to be found in the conflicting forces of rival clans; in commerce, finance, development; in race, class or religious strife. The soul of the city resided in the spiritual endeavour of brilliant minds burrowing away in subterranean libraries and laboratories.

These qualities don’t provide the drive of realist drama. The great novels of Oxford (the Alice books of Lewis Carroll, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) have been those whose authors used the city as a playground in which they let loose their fantastic imaginations. It’s surely pertinent that while Ian Rankin takes readers into picturesque Edinburgh’s seedy back alleys, Morse, in Colin Dexter’s Oxford, pits his wits against sinister bluestockings and deadly dons.

Realism in the dream city has been impossible. Until now, that is. For Oxford has changed. Science entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, university and council administrators have been collaborating these past 20 years in transforming Oxford from a city snoozing in the Thames valley into an incubator of the new science-enterprise culture. What Oxford offers is “synergy” between academia and business. Talk at high table has been of patent and copyright, as professors set up private companies to profit from their intellectual goods. There have already been some 70 spin-off companies from the university, and between 1991 and 2001 Oxfordshire experienced the highest rate of growth in high-technology employment in Britain: by 2001 there were more bioscience firms in the county than in Holland or Sweden. High-tech overtook education as an employer, in business and science parks clustering around the Oxford ring road.

Where business led, people have followed. While the UK population rose by a little less than 7% between 1981 and 2001, Oxford’s grew by 28%. All these people have to live somewhere. When I came to the city it was striking how much green space there was: not only in parks and quads and meadows but also in scrub land, neglected corners, overgrown orchards. Nowadays, every inch of spare land inside the green belt is a slice of real estate.

Many of the changes I am describing are common across southeast England. What is peculiar to Oxford is that what has become so rare here — a placid pace of life in beautiful surroundings, conducive to deep thought — continues to be evoked as the selling point by the very initiatives that change it.

I found the title for my fifth novel, Blenheim Orchard, when I drove through a village outside Oxford and passed a field with a building site, and a sign saying Tubney Orchard. Where were the trees? Of course, they’d all been cut down and their roots dug up. All that remains of the fruit trees that used to grow in this field is the word “Orchard” in the name of the housing estate that has replaced them. Which you can regard as irony, shamelessness, or pride in our heritage, depending on your outlook.

Am I complaining? Hardly. It’s precisely these developments that have made it possible to set a contemporary novel here. Blenheim Orchard explores the ways in which we influence both those closest to us and the world far beyond — our moral footprint, if you like. A cast of family, friends and work colleagues engages in conflicts of power and conscience that would have been quaint if set in the Oxford of a generation ago. The dynamic Oxford of today, however, increasingly resembling every other British city, but with an intellectual and entrepreneurial cutting edge, seems a perfectly appropriate setting for such drama. q

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Tim Pears talks about the influences on his new novel, Blenheim Orchard, at the festival, on Thursday, March 22, at 8.30pm

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