The discussion of the Abbey, er, I mean, ‘castle’, has been amusing for showing how much people are willing to sound off on topics from a single obviously-untrustworthy photograph. Have you ever seen a photograph of the interior or a layout? No, you merely see the single aerial real estate brochure shot using a telephoto zoom lenses framed as flatteringly as possible to include stuff that isn’t even the Abbey—like that turreted ‘castle’ you see in the photo up above isn’t even part of the Abbey—because that’s an active church, All Saints Church!* (Really, apply some critical thinking here: you think some manor house one can buy will just have a bunch of visible graves in it...?)
Let me ask something: how many of the people debating the Abbey on this page have been there? I don’t see anyone directly addressing the core claim of ‘luxury’, so I will.
I was there for an AI workshop earlier this year in Spring and stayed for 2 or 3 days, so let me tell you about the ‘luxury’ of the ‘EA castle’: it’s a big, empty, cold, stone box, with an awkward layout. (People kept getting lost trying to find the bathroom or a specific room.) Most of the furnishings were gone. Much of the layout you can see in Google Maps was nonfunctional, and several wings were off-limits or defunct, so in practice it was maybe a quarter of the size you’d expect from the Google Maps overview. There were clearly extensive needs for repair and remodeling of a lot of ancient construction, and most of the gardens are abandoned as too expensive to maintain. It is, as a real estate agent might say, very ‘historical’ and a ‘good fixer-upper’.
The kitchen area is pretty nice, but the part of the Abbey I admired most, from the standpoint of ‘luxury’, was the view of the neighboring farmer’s field. (It was extraordinarily green and verdant and picturesque, truly exemplifying “green and pleasant land”. I tried to take some photos on my phone, but they never capture the wetness & coloring.)
Otherwise, the best efforts of the hardworking staff at the workshop notwithstanding—and I’m trying not to make this sound like an insult—I would rate the level of ‘luxury’ as roughly ‘student hostel’ level. (Which is fully acceptable to me, but anyone expecting ‘luxury’ or the elite lifestyle of the Western nomenklatura is going to be disappointed. Windsor or Balmoral or a 5-star hotel, this is not.) Indeed, I’m not sure how the place could be in much rougher shape while still being an acceptable setting for a conference. (Once you’re down to a big mattress in an empty room, it’s hard to go down further without, like, removing electricity and indoor plumbing.)
The virtue of the Abbey is that it can be relatively easily reached from London/the rest of the world by simple public transit routes that even a first-time foreigner can navigate successfully, and contain a decent number of people without paying extortionate Oxford hotel rates or forcing people to waste hours a day going back & forth between their own lodgings creating lots of overhead in coordination. (“Oh, you should talk to Jack about that! oh, he just called an Uber for his hotel. Never mind.”)
Buying it seems entirely reasonable to me assuming adequate utilization in terms of hosting events. (Which may or may not be the case, but no one here or elsewhere is even attempting to make it.) Nor do I see why any sort of public discussion would be so important and so scandalous to not have, because this is a subject on which any sort of ‘public discussion’ would be pointless—random Internet commenters don’t have a better idea of the FHI/EA event calendar or constraints of Oxford hotel booking than the people who were making the decisions here.
* I don’t know if technically it sits on the Abbey parcel or what, because England has lots of weird situations like that, but EA and EA visitors are obviously not getting any good or ‘luxury’ out of an active church regardless of its de jure status (we made no use of it in any way I saw), and including it in the image is misleading in an ordinary realtor sort of way.
The discussion of the Abbey, er, I mean, ‘castle’, has been amusing for showing how much people are willing to sound off on topics from a single obviously-untrustworthy photograph. Have you ever seen a photograph of the interior or a layout? No, you merely see the single aerial real estate brochure shot using a telephoto zoom lenses framed as flatteringly as possible to include stuff that isn’t even the Abbey—like that turreted ‘castle’ you see in the photo up above isn’t even part of the Abbey—because that’s an active church, All Saints Church!* (Really, apply some critical thinking here: you think some manor house one can buy will just have a bunch of visible graves in it...?)
Let me ask something: how many of the people debating the Abbey on this page have been there? I don’t see anyone directly addressing the core claim of ‘luxury’, so I will.
I was there for an AI workshop earlier this year in Spring and stayed for 2 or 3 days, so let me tell you about the ‘luxury’ of the ‘EA castle’: it’s a big, empty, cold, stone box, with an awkward layout. (People kept getting lost trying to find the bathroom or a specific room.) Most of the furnishings were gone. Much of the layout you can see in Google Maps was nonfunctional, and several wings were off-limits or defunct, so in practice it was maybe a quarter of the size you’d expect from the Google Maps overview. There were clearly extensive needs for repair and remodeling of a lot of ancient construction, and most of the gardens are abandoned as too expensive to maintain. It is, as a real estate agent might say, very ‘historical’ and a ‘good fixer-upper’.
The kitchen area is pretty nice, but the part of the Abbey I admired most, from the standpoint of ‘luxury’, was the view of the neighboring farmer’s field. (It was extraordinarily green and verdant and picturesque, truly exemplifying “green and pleasant land”. I tried to take some photos on my phone, but they never capture the wetness & coloring.)
Otherwise, the best efforts of the hardworking staff at the workshop notwithstanding—and I’m trying not to make this sound like an insult—I would rate the level of ‘luxury’ as roughly ‘student hostel’ level. (Which is fully acceptable to me, but anyone expecting ‘luxury’ or the elite lifestyle of the Western nomenklatura is going to be disappointed. Windsor or Balmoral or a 5-star hotel, this is not.) Indeed, I’m not sure how the place could be in much rougher shape while still being an acceptable setting for a conference. (Once you’re down to a big mattress in an empty room, it’s hard to go down further without, like, removing electricity and indoor plumbing.)
The virtue of the Abbey is that it can be relatively easily reached from London/the rest of the world by simple public transit routes that even a first-time foreigner can navigate successfully, and contain a decent number of people without paying extortionate Oxford hotel rates or forcing people to waste hours a day going back & forth between their own lodgings creating lots of overhead in coordination. (“Oh, you should talk to Jack about that! oh, he just called an Uber for his hotel. Never mind.”)
Buying it seems entirely reasonable to me assuming adequate utilization in terms of hosting events. (Which may or may not be the case, but no one here or elsewhere is even attempting to make it.) Nor do I see why any sort of public discussion would be so important and so scandalous to not have, because this is a subject on which any sort of ‘public discussion’ would be pointless—random Internet commenters don’t have a better idea of the FHI/EA event calendar or constraints of Oxford hotel booking than the people who were making the decisions here.
* I don’t know if technically it sits on the Abbey parcel or what, because England has lots of weird situations like that, but EA and EA visitors are obviously not getting any good or ‘luxury’ out of an active church regardless of its de jure status (we made no use of it in any way I saw), and including it in the image is misleading in an ordinary realtor sort of way.