Sir – It is perfectly understandable that those who are particularly affected by the university flats near Port Meadow should be against them, and I would not have given approval for them myself.

However, many of your readers live far away, and like myself they only use the meadow a couple of times a year, probably for a pleasant walk to Wolvercote.

I would like to assure them that their interests are virtually unaffected. I started out this week at Walton Well Road and would scarcely have noticed the new flats if I had not been looking out for them.

Proceeding on the footpath past the sailing club, and stopping frequently to look back at the view, it was only at one point about two-thirds of the way towards Wolvercote that part of the city might have been visible but was obscured by these flats. At Wolvercote, the usual view is completely unaffected, so much so that even the entire window in the tower of St Barnabas Church is visible behind the new flats.

The worst obstructions in 2007 were poplars screening the Radcliffe Camera and hiding the Sheldonian Theatre, but it would be easier and much more valuable to cut them down than to take storeys off the new flats as suggested.

So they are a mistake, but not so huge a mistake as some would have us believe.

Roger Moreton, Oxford