Sir - A.J. Green (Letters, November 30), who represents himself, or is it herself, as "one of us poor souls who live in an historic city" appears to revile everything modern in the visual arts.

Presumably, in the eighteenth century he would have opposed the building of the Radcliffe Observatory and Radcliffe Camera, both strikingly different from the medieval buildings which surrounded them. And in the nineteenth century he would have undoubtedly sided with the French academicians in condemning the Impressionists.

We must be thankful for those more enlightened souls who have already commissioned so many fine modern buildings within the Oxford colleges in the latter half of the twentieth century, and hope that their successors will have the resolve to continue to do so.

Trevor Hendy, Woodstock