Sir – The recent acquisition by the Bodleian Library of a draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Binsey Poplars is enthusiastically heralded on Oxford University’s website because it gives a ‘remarkable insight into how the poet crafts his passionate lament on man’s disregard for the sanctity of nature’.

How ironic, then, that that same University should simultaneously be intent on sullying the natural wonder of Port Meadow with the post-graduate flats at Roger Dudman Way.


I suggest that Hopkins would not be the only world-famous creative alumnus to be appalled: William Morris, Edward Burne Jones, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Southey, John Ruskin, and Lewis Carroll — to name but a few — have derived joy and inspiration from the Meadow.

Similarly creative individuals will be obliged to look well away from the south-eastern corner in the future — or perhaps, like Hopkins, to write only laments.
Mark Davies, Oxford