The Headington Shark

The Headington Shark is a rooftop sculpture located in Oxford, England, depicting a large shark embedded head-first in the roof of a house. The shark first appeared on 9 August 1986.

The sculpture, which is reported to weigh 4 long hundredweight and is 25 feet long, and is made of painted fiberglass, is named Untitled 1986. The sculpture was erected on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. It was designed by sculptor John Buckley and constructed by Anton Castiau, a local carpenter and friend of John Buckley.

The 7.6 metre (25f) sculpture of a shark crashing through the roof of Magnus Hanson-Heine’s house in Oxfordshire is now a protected landmark – and he’s not happy about it.

Bill Heine, an American expat who studied law at the University of Oxford, got the idea for the sculpture after he heard US warplanes fly over his house one night in April 1986. When he woke up the next morning, he learned that the planes had been on their way to bomb Tripoli in retaliation for Libyan sponsorship of terrorist attacks on US troops.

The image of a shark crashing through the roof captured the shock civilians must feel when bombs smash into their homes, Magnus Hanson-Heine said. His father died in 2019.

Heine and his friend sculptor John Buckley built the great white out of fiberglass, then installed it on 9 August, the 41st anniversary of the day the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The shark’s anti-war message is just as important today, Henson-Heine said.