Oakridge is a village in

Gloucestershire Gloucestershire ( abbreviated Glos) is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn and the entire Forest of Dean. The county town is the city of Gl ...

, England. The parish church is St. Bartholomew's Church. It is just on the outskirts of

Stroud, Gloucestershire Stroud is a market town and civil parish in Gloucestershire, England. It is the main town in Stroud District. The town's population was 13,500 in 2021. Below the western escarpment of the Cotswold Hills, at the meeting point of the Five Va ...

. Oakridge consists of five hamlets; Oakridge Lynch, Far Oakridge, Waterlane, Bournes Green, and Tunley. Within Oakridge Lynch can be found the

parish church A parish church (or parochial church) in Christianity is the church which acts as the religious centre of a parish. In many parts of the world, especially in rural areas, the parish church may play a significant role in community activities, ...

of St. Bartholomew's, the nearby Oakridge Parochial School primary, the village Shop and Post Office, The Butchers Arms pub, and the Village Hall. The Butchers Arms is an 18th-century building with stone walls and oak beamed ceilings. The Annual Oakridge Village Show is held on the first Saturday in September at the local recreation ground.

Notable residents

Charles Mason Charles Mason (April 1728 Alfred Hoare Powell Alfred Hoare Powell (1865–1960) was an English Arts and Crafts architect, and designer and painter of pottery. Career Alfred Powell was born in Reading, Berkshire, on 14 April 1865, the son of Thomas Edward Powell by Emma Corrie. He wa ...

bought and restored Gurners Farm in Oakridge Lynch around 1902.Pat Carrick, Kay Rhodes and Juliet Shipman, ''Oakridge, A History'', 2005 Gurners Farm was rented from Alfred Powell by the writer and drama producer

Mabel Dearmer Jessie Mabel Pritchard Dearmer (née White; 22 March 1872 – 15 July 1915) was an English novelist, dramatist and children's book author/illustrator. She was a committed pacifist who died while caring for the war wounded in Serbia. Early life ...

for some months in 1914. From 1913 to 1920 Sir

William Rothenstein Sir William Rothenstein (29 January 1872 – 14 February 1945) was an English painter, printmaker, draughtsman, lecturer, and writer on art. Emerging during the early 1890s, Rothenstein continued to make art right up until his death. Though he c ...

, artist and some time Principal of the Royal College of Art, lived at Iles Farm in Far Oakridge, which he restored and furnished with the help of members of the Arts and Crafts movement based at Sapperton.William Rothenstein, ''Men and Memories'', 1932 Notable persons who visited Rothenstein in Oakridge included

Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore (; bn, রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He resh ...

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

A. E. Housman Alfred Edward Housman (; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. After an initially poor performance while at university, he took employment as a clerk in London and established his academic reputation by pub ...

Augustus John Augustus Edwin John (4 January 1878 – 31 October 1961) was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a time he was considered the most important artist at work in Britain: Virginia Woolf remarked that by 1908 the era of John Singer Sarg ...

. John Drinkwater and

André Gide André Paul Guillaume Gide (; 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the Symbolism (arts), symbolist movement, to the advent o ...

Max Beerbohm Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956) was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the '' Saturday ...

spent the years of

the Great War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

at Winston Cottage as William Rothenstein's guest. Dame

Margaret Weston Dame Margaret Kate Weston, Order of the British Empire, DBE, Fellow of the Museums Association, FMA (7 March 1926 – 12 January 2021) was a British museum curator who was the director of the Science Museum, London, Science Museum, London, bet ...

, director of the Science Museum, grew up in the village and also lived there in retirement.

References

External links

Stroud Voices (Oakridge filter) - oral history site
Villages in Gloucestershire Stroud District {{Gloucestershire-geo-stub