Shark house owner loses appeal to let home

The owner of a famous house with a fibreglass shark sticking out of its roof has lost an appeal over whether he can rent it out on Airbnb.

Dr Magnus Hanson-Heine owns the Headington Shark House in New High Street, Oxford. His late dad, journalist Bill Heine, installed the famous artwork in 1986.

Dr Hanson-Heine appealed Oxford City Council's decision that it should not be used for short-term lets but a planning inspector sided with the local authority.

The authority's actions will leave Oxford's "tourism and accommodation sector significantly poorer", Dr Hanson-Heine said.

He told the BBC in January he had rented the house out for several years but was only given a notice to stop short-term lets in July 2023.

The planning inspector found that while the house represented a "very modest reduction" in Oxford's housing supply, it was inappropriate for short-term lets according to the council's own planning rules.

Under those, short-term lets should only be allowed in the city centre, in allocated sites in district centres or on Oxford's "main arterial roads where there is frequent and direct public transport to the city centre".

The inspector admitted the house was in an "appropriate location" for short-term lets given its closeness to Headington's London Road, so the appeal was "not without merit", but still ruled against it.

The council wanted to give Dr Hanson-Heine a month to stop the lets but the inspector has given him three months to comply.

"Certain elements of the council have just used this as an excuse to score some cheap political points by going after a local landmark at the expense of the public," Dr Hanson-Heine said.

"This does nothing meaningful to help people looking for homes, and after March all they will have done is to rob people who want to experience this piece of Oxford's history from the inside.

"Oxford's tourism and accommodation sector will be significantly poorer for it."

The city council said the last publicly available data suggested there were about 1,300 short-term lets in Oxford in June 2023.

"It's almost impossible to say how many much-needed homes Oxford has lost to short lets because the sector is still virtually unregulated," the council's cabinet member for housing and communities, Linda Smith, said.

"What we do know is there are nearly 3,500 households on our waiting list and that short lets can cause misery in our communities."

The shark, which was controversial when it appeared in 1986, was added to the Oxford Heritage Asset Register in 2022, which recognises places of important local cultural, social or historic value.

Installed by former BBC Radio Oxford presenter Mr Heine and sculpted by John Buckley, Untitled 1986 was a cause celebre when it landed.

It was erected on the 41st anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Japanese city Nagasaki.

Heine, who died in 2019, was told it broke planning rules and he was only able to keep it when Lord Heseltine - then Michael Heseltine and the environment secretary - backed an appeal in 1992.

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