With some satisfaction I learned this week that I had done my bit to preserve the architectural integrity of one of Oxford's more interesting and distinguished buildings. In short, I have been able to get a pair of satellite dishes removed from the walls of Campion Hall, the Jesuits' Oxford base, in Brewer Street. They haven't actually gone yet, but I am advised by the city planners that they should no longer be there in three months time.

Quite how long they have been there I am afraid I do not know. I first saw them in October and afterwards sent the following email message to Nick Worlledge, the city council's conservation officer: "I wonder if I might trouble you with a request for information. Cycling half an hour ago along Brewer Street, down which I rarely venture, I noticed two satellite dishes, one black and one white, disfiguring Campion Hall. I imagine that planning permission must have been sought and given for this unsightly addition to one of Oxford's famous buildings, Grade II* listed, I believe and Lutyens's only work in the city. I would be interested to know on what basis consent was given."

I confess that my suspicion was that consent had not been sought, for it hardly seemed likely that permission would have been given for such a blot on the streetscape. No less likely, some might have thought, was that the authorities at Campion Hall should have been prepared to mess with Lutyens's austere design in this way. But who can say what compelling reasons they might have had for wanting the dishes? Perhaps the Jesuit scholars sit around of an evening tuned into To the Manor Bowen on UK Living or even the endless repeats of Frazier on the Paramount Comedy Channel.

My message to Mr Worlledge was answered by Celia Diaz, the planning department's enforcement officer, who promised that the matter would be looked into. She added that this might take a little time to resolve. I inquired this week about progress and received the following, very satisfactory, reply: "A site visit was held on 13th November with Conservation, the Bursar, the installer and myself. It was confirmed that it was possible to operate the system with one mesh dish in a more discrete she, of course, meant discreet position rather than the two now installed. It was agreed that the two satellite dishes could be retained until Listed Building Consent granted, which would probably take about three months."

All was clear, except for one niggling matter. I asked about it: "I assume then, to go back to my first question, that the dishes were put up without planning consent, which is rather what I had suspected." Ms Diaz replied tersely: "Yes it does."

The capacity for satellite dishes to harm the appearance of any building to which they are attached has been well understood ever since they were invented. What makes the placing of a pair on Campion Hall the more offensive is that Sir Edwin Lutyens purposely designed a building on which there were no 'sticky-out bits'. As Roderick Gradidge, an authority on the architect, explained in Edwin Lutyens, Architect Laureate, published in 1981: "No mouldings are anywhere allowed to project in front of the wall plane and all openings including the entrance door . . . are punched straight into the wall plane."

The merits of the building were appreciated by the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner. He writes in the Oxfordshire volume of The Buildings of England: "Lutyens managed in terms of his, internationally speaking, retrograde style to make something interesting out of an unpromising frontage. Coming from St Aldate's one sees first the polygonal east end of the chapel, elevated above a ground floor with two round arches." It is precisely this 'first sight', of course, that the satellite dishes impair.

It is thanks to Lutyens himself, interestingly, that Oxford has this one example of his work (the official opening of which, in 1936, is shown in the picture above). The commission was first given to another architect, whose plans Lutyens waspishly described as "Queen Anne in front; Mary Anne behind". The Jesuit theologian Father Martin D'Arcy asked if Lutyens would recommend someone else for the job. The architect replied: "There is nothing I would rather do myself." His intervention led to his being sued by the spurned draughtsman for unprofessional conduct. Happily for Lutyens, the case was lost.