It seems likely that when the story of the rape of Port Meadow is eventually written there will be — and, pray, let she or he be made to suffer for it — one person who will stand out as the principal villain.
A fruitful field of research might concern itself with how a project on this massive scale managed to remain ‘under wraps’ until the very point of its execution.
The Save Port Meadow Campaign, in its excellent new leaflet, sets the matter out straightforwardly. It bemoans the lack of proper community consultation “because the plans were slipped through as a ‘variation’ on a ten-year-old planning permission”.
The group goes on to announce its laudable aim of “holding Oxford City Council and the University to account for their failures”.
About the city council I am deeply suspicious. Nothing of what was in the offing — except in the vaguest general terms — was mentioned to me when I raised the matter of the closure of the cycle track through the site with one of our local councillors. I thought this odd.
The vast scale of these buildings — vile, violent — hit me anew on Tuesday as I pedalled in the sunshine past the Perch and was suddenly confronted by the obscenity. In their finished state externally, the flats look even worse now, strangely, than they did when cloaked in scaffolding.
Their ugliness continued to haunt me most of the rest of the way home, the blocks looming horribly on the left — as in my colleague Neil Braggins’s photograph — between Fiddler’s Island and the railway station. To help finance Save Port Meadow go to the website justgiving.com/portmeadow
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