YOUNG footballers and worried residents have stepped up their campaign to stop a North Oxford recreation ground becoming a new cemetery.

The site at Five Mile Drive was listed by Oxford City Council earlier this year as an option to provide extra burial space on the edge of Wolvercote Cemetery.

Space to bury the dead could run out in Oxford within a decade, and the park was one of four sites shortlisted as potential new cemeteries in June.

During a consultation on the use of sites around the city, 550 people signed a petition against the proposal, with another 75 writing to the Town Hall in opposition.

Summertown Stars youth football club currently uses the two football pitches for under 13s and girls under 16s matches and training.

And at a council meeting last week, Five Mile Drive resident Richard Lawrence-Wilson said children had nowhere else to play in the neighbourhood.

Mr Lawrence-Wilson told councillors: “We have no community hall, no church, no pub, no shop – everything except the recreation ground is on the other side of busy trunk roads beyond the safe reach of our children.”

The council has conceded that even if Wolvercote Cemetery is expanded into the recreation ground, it is not big enough to provide a long-term solution.

Mr Lawrence-Wilson added: “Within a short time, the city would be looking for more burial space, but our children and grandchildren would never get their playing fields back.

“The city’s Victorian cemeteries, that are today almost full, were established in open countryside beyond the urban limit.

“We now need new cemetery space beyond the current edge of the city.”

Summertown Stars vice chairman Roger Parry told the Oxford Mail: “We are a growing football club, and we have lots of kids wanting to play. If you take two pitches away, unless they provided elsewhere, it would reduce the amount of football we could play.”

He added: “That would be a complete disaster, and a real shame in a day and age when we want kids to be fit and healthy.”

The campaigners argue that the fields surrounding Oxford Crematorium, in Bayswater Road, Headington, should instead be used for burials.

The other sites under consideration are Almonds Farm in Marston and two sites outside the city boundaries in Horspath.

City council spokesman Louisa Dean said: “We are still in the process of evaluating the short list of options to meet the need for future burial space. We anticipate that this work will be completed within the next few months.”