Sir – In 1970, when I arrived in Oxford to take up the post of Oxford city landscape architect, two spectacular and highly controversial landscape projects had just been completed.

The Stokenchurch cut through the Chilterns on the M40, and Didcot Power Station. The two projects are a perfect compliment, the cut forming a gateway to the city from London, and affording wonderful views across the Oxford plain to the power station and its steaming cooling towers.

I remember taking my niece as a little girl to Wittenham Clumps, and on seeing the cooling towers, she described them as cloud-making machines. Frederick Gibberd, the architect for the power station, managed to persuade the Central Electricity Generating Board to arrange the towers in two groups either side of the boiler house.

I was most impressed by his decision, as I had been involved with Radcliffe Power Station where the cooling towers are in a single group to one side of the boiler house, and my boss, Gordon Patterson had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the electricity board to separate the towers to achieve a balanced composition.

Major engineering projects invariably come in for a great deal of opposition, however co-operation between landscape architects and engineers can insure that large structures compliment the landscape. Didcot Power Station, to be demolished in 2014, will be sorely missed.

John Thompson, Oxford