Sir – The new university buildings on Roger Dudman Way are ugly and obscure views of parts of the skyline of the city from parts of Port Meadow.

Three thousand people signed a petition demanding that a retrospective Environmental Impact Assessment be carried out, ‘soft’ landscaping should be introduced and the ‘council’ be trained in consultation.


However, the campaign to ‘fix’ the problem appears now to be pursuing a legal challenge to the city council on the basis of alleged maladministration and, perhaps, an erroneous grant of planning consent. Where is this going? If the council loses the court battle, not only will it face legal costs but also the costs of whatever remedy is decided upon.


The campaigners talk of removal of two floors and it has been suggested that this might cost ‘six figures’. This seems wholly unrealistic, especially as the developer could expect reimbursement of the abortive costs of building the two removed floors in the first place and compensation for financial losses arising from the wrongly-granted consent. Ten million pounds sounds like a more realistic figure for the council’s potential liabilities.
But the city council’s money is our money, contributed either directly from our council tax, or indirectly via central Government grants. With 55,000 households in the city, £10m equates to an average of £180 on every household council tax bill. Even £1m represents nearly £20 on the tax bills of all of us. Is the ‘disaster’ at Roger Dudman Way really worth this to every household in Oxford? Three thousand people (many not actually city residents) may have signed the petition, but this result is not what the petition called for, and what do the 130,000-plus other residents of the city think about paying for it?
Sonja Drexler, Oxford