Scaled back

Faced with calls to ensure that Oxford’s historic Castle Mound must not be hidden by the proposed £35m new visitor attraction, it requested architects Foster and Partners to look again at the plan.

What has emerged is a centre barely recognisable from what had been originally put forward exactly a year ago.

Regular readers will recall the image of the centre in New Road, in the shadow of the mound, with the dome of a giant planetarium, cut like a diamond, at its heart.

Visitors were to have been offered spectacular sky-at-night shows and the chance to journey through the human circulation system and see the structures of the heart.

A projected 30,000 local children a year would visit the centre with a learning laboratory for more advanced science students. The centre would also be home to some 50 small businesses, with this remarkable structure drawn up by architects responsible for some of the world’s most impressive modern buildings.

It had been challenge enough to fit so much on this comparatively small, oddly-shaped site. Having to reduce the height of buildings has inevitably meant key visual elements of the scheme have had to go.

News that the planetarium now looks like being housed in a basement will disappoint many.

But Science Oxford must be applauded for trying again. There had been a certain attraction in linking the old and new — an innovation centre next to one of Oxford’s ancient monuments — but this site was never going to be the easy option.

There will be those still unhappy that the Oxford Register Office building would still have to go under the revised plans, now emerging.

But the charity says if that building were saved the new centre — combining a visitor attraction and home for businesses — would simply be unviable. To ask Science Oxford to do more would be tantamount to saying Oxford does not want this building dedicated to science at its heart.