Actor Simon Callow has joined the chorus of protests about Oxford Brookes University’s plans for a new £150m campus.

The Four Weddings and a Funeral star said he had been shocked by the Brookes scheme to redevelop its Gipsy Lane site and said he had decided to speak out in the hope that the scheme could be stopped before it “traumatised the local landscape.”

Mr Callow’s intervention came after the Oxford Mail reported last week that people living near the university were unhappy about the size of the scheme.

He said: “Like most people who have seen the plans, I am aghast.

“For several decades, I have been a regular visitor to Oxford, often working at the Playhouse, as director and actor, and appearing in films and on television. I have also been involved in teaching at summer schools at Balliol and Magdalen.

“Equally importantly for me, whenever I have a book to write, I come to Oxford because of its harmoniousness – the ideal balance between buildings, ancient and modern, and the landscape. The plans for Brookes are a shocking transgression of this balance.

“Both in scale and character they traumatise the landscape. It is shocking that such unimaginative, formulaic and unyielding architecture should be proposed by a university.

“Its unrelenting rectangles will brutally transform an area noted for its gracefulness and its human scale.”

Mr Callow, who has appeared in episodes of Morse and Lewis, said he found it particularly depressing that the scheme was proposed at a gateway to a city viewed as “one of the great glories of Western urban architecture.”

Brookes deputy vice-chancellor, Rex Knight, said: “The comments made by Simon Callow... are clearly not based on a proper understanding of our proposals. Overall the feedback has been very positive.

“Great care has been taken with the overall design in a bid to create a dynamic, modern learning space at the heart of Oxfordshire that will not only enhance the student learning experience but open up the university to the local community.”

But Susan Lake, chairman of the Headington Hill Residents’ Association, said: “Like Simon Callow, we feel Oxford’s traditional setting of harmonious balance between its buildings and its characteristic leafy landscape is betrayed by Brookes plans.