Who wouldn’t want to get behind the wheel of a great big bulldozer?

Who wouldn’t want to smash a wrecking ball into the bad 1970s hangover of the Westgate multi-storey car park?

I’m surprised the council isn’t selling tickets.

I remember driving into the multi-storey with my dad.

I was flabbergasted by the high concrete ceilings. This was a building that had arrived from another planet.

We came from the Oxfordshire countryside.

A generation or two earlier men had worked the fields on a diet of homemade cider, bread and lard. Suddenly we were accelerating on the ramps and slabs of the future -

How the town planners must have grinned as the Lord Mayor cut the ceremonial ribbon.

How the ticket machines pinged as the cars began rolling in.

I’m sure a similar sense of triumph rolls around boardrooms today.

I bet at this very moment someone, somewhere, is sending a congratulatory email.

The construction of the Westgate ripped a hole in Oxford’s history.

As basements were hastily scooped out much of the city’s medieval remains became landfill. It was a significant loss.

The car park itself stands on Old Greyfriars Street, named after the Franciscan Friars who made their home here in the 1220s.

Disciples of St Francis of Assisi, their gardens were said to resemble an earthly paradise.

Hence nearby Paradise Street and Paradise Square. Here stood the west gate of the medieval city.

It corresponded to the east gate ( roughly where the Eastgate Hotel is), St Michael at the Northgate and the south gate where Christ Church now reigns.

Walk around your city sometime. Imagine those city walls and tremble. There is so much history beneath your feet that your shoes could wear out.

But that’s okay. Soon you’ll be able to buy a new pair from a giant, identikit branch of John Lewis.

Personally I’m not convinced that Oxford needs a new shopping centre. After all, how much shopping can anyone reasonably do before abandoned retail units creep in?

Will the number of jobs it creates be equal to the number it destroys as small, independent retailers are driven out of business?

I see there will be a new five screen cinema.

Yet when I took my children to see the new Disney film in the George Street cinema last week we were about the only people there.

I’m old fashioned and don’t really understand. But it seems to me an invitation to a city centre to board up its shop fronts and celebrate dereliction. And why? So we can build retail outlets that put us on a par with Swindon? Few will mourn it but I liked the Westgate multi-storey car park. It was big, ugly, cold and windswept but then so am I.