Sir – Reports earlier this year implied unanimous approval of Wilkinson Eyre’s redevelopment plans for the New Bodleian. Your readers’ letters now reveal otherwise.

There is significant opinion that the New Bodleian Library is unworthy of its site, and mixed views as to whether its ugliness is redeemable. The Bodleian’s consultation seems too little too late.

The intention to redevelop the New Bodleian was announced in September 2007. Almost three years later we face a fait accompli for both form and function and are asked only whether we endorse it.

How much open consultation did the Bodleian undertake in 2007, to ask the people of Oxford what we would like to happen to the building? Instead there seems to have been a patrician presumption that “Bod knows best” and we will get what we are given. Colin Cohen is a good chap but I do not agree that the New Bodleian “is with us for a long time” because it is Grade II listed (Letters, June 17). Sarah Thomas claimed likewise in October 2007 when I first proposed demolition.

In fact the city council could be asked for listed building consent for demolition. Were it not granted, the Secretary of State could be asked to de-list the building.

The New Bodleian disfigures an otherwise happy mixture of vernacular buildings and important neoclassical ones in a key part of an important conservation area.

S. Wyatt (Letters, June 17) fears demolition would make way for an unsympathetic redevelopment. But listed building consent should not be granted except for a redevelopment that would improve the conservation area.

Oxford needs more public space. Broad Street and Cornmarket suffer from conflicting uses as thoroughfares and places to gather and linger. A new square instead of the current bunker would both meet this need and better show off Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building and its neighbours.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford