Damian Fantato looks back at a road bid that was rejected, but which changed the way city heritage is protected

Driving through Oxford can be a nightmare, and many motorists will surely have been moved to come up with their own ideas about how to tackle the city’s traffic jams.

But few of these ideas could surely be quite as radical as those proposed by Geoffrey Jellicoe 50 years ago this month.

His name will be unfamiliar to a great number of people, but he was responsible for one of the most contentious proposals in the history of a city where contentious proposals are common.

Sir Geoffrey was one of the 20th-century's leading landscape architects, with a career spanning almost 70 years.

But in Oxford he is probably best known for his idea that the city’s traffic problems could be solved by the construction of a sunken relief road across Christ Church Meadow.

Such was the uproar this scheme caused that it changed the way the people of Oxford treat the city’s heritage and led directly to the formation of the Oxford Civic Society.

It was also reputed to have been discussed by then PM Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet ahead of the difficulties surrounding the Suez Canal. Macmillan, an Oxford man himself, clearly regarded the proposed road as more important a matter than matters in the Middle East/North Africa.

Today such a seemingly absurd road scheme is unthinkable, and Oxford’s traffic problems are rightly dealt with in much more sensitive ways.

The land which today makes up Christ Church Meadow was given to St Frideswide’s Priory by Lady Montacute in the 14th century.

It was St Frideswide’s Priory which became Cardinal College and, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Christ Church.

It is the meadow’s position between East Oxford, the city centre and South Oxford which led to it being coveted by planners keen to concrete it over.

Urban planner Thomas Sharp was the first person to suggest such an idea, when he presented his report called Oxford Replanned to Oxford City Council in 1948.

In it, he suggested converting the Broad Walk into a road which would connect St Aldates to The Plain — as well as turning Queen Street into a public square and demolishing what is now the Oxford Castle quarter for a park.

Unsurprisingly, this project didn’t make it off the ground and — apart from the brief threat of Oxford Chamber of Trade proposing the construction of a road called ‘Cathedral Mall’ across it — Christ Church Meadow looked to be safe.

But in 1960, the city council asked the Minister of Housing and Local Government to conduct an inquiry into Oxford’s road problems.

At the end of it, the inspector, Sir Frederick Armer, concluded that the construction of a road across Christ Church Meadow was “inescapable”.

His report was upheld by the Minister of Housing and Local Government, Dr Charles Hill, in 1962 and it was then that Mr GA Jellicoe strode on to the scene (it would be another 17 years before he became a knight of the realm).

What became known as the Jellicoe Plan was unveiled in 1963 and consisted of a landscaped, sunken road through the middle of the meadow.

His report was surprisingly matter-of-fact about the whole scheme: “In order to preserve the space of the meadow intact, the objective is to make a neat cut, insert the road, and join the parts together by illusion, so that they again become one.

“It is anticipated that this illusion can be almost wholly sustained from the Broad Walk, and elsewhere in varying degrees.”

The Jellicoe Plan consisted of a road cut an average of 17.5ft deep into Christ Church Meadow with raised banks along it to prevent flooding but also to stop cattle “and indeed human beings” from falling in.

It would also involve knocking down 153 houses on Iffley Road, diverting the River Cherwell eastwards and the Trill Mill Stream across the meadow and would have cost an estimated £1.7m An artificial hill would have been created to the east of the meadow and would have been “heavily planted” to mask the line of the road as it descended from a new bridge over the Cherwell into the cutting.

And then the plans were warmly welcomed by the Oxford community and went ahead.

Well, not quite.

Within months of the scheme being proposed, Oxford University in Congregation passed by 120 votes to 11 a decree opposing the road, while Ivan Lloyd Phillips, the secretary of Oxford Preservation Trust, said that “irreparable damage” would be done to the historic meadow.

The issue, which The Economist referred to as a “deathless melodrama”, filled the letters pages of both The Oxford Times and the national newspapers.

Christ Church itself referred to the scheme as “repugnant and offensive”.

Another public inquiry into the issue was held in 1965 and, by this time, the Minister of Housing and Local Government was Richard Crossman who made the decision in 1966 to postpone the scheme and then told the city council to carry out another independent review.

When these consultants eventually reported in 1968 they favoured a relief road further out of the city at Eastwyke Farm (where the Four Pillars Hotel now stands), cutting across Abingdon Road, Iffley Road and Cowley Road.

Despite attempts to reignite interest in the Christ Church scheme, most notably from urban planner Thomas Sharp who continued to insist it was the best and cheapest option, appetite for the scheme dissipated.

The Eastwyke Farm scheme was eventually approved in 1971, although this did not go ahead either.

Now, proposing to concrete over one of Oxford’s sensitive green spaces would be seen as impossible.

The current Dean of Christ Church, the Very Rev Christopher Lewis, said this week: “Human progress is an interesting phenomenon.

“Now it would be unthinkable to have a road across the meadow which is, as people know, a wonderful feature of central Oxford.

“One of the ways we have advanced is that we are more conscious of green space and more conscious of the history of particular areas.”

Peter Thompson, the chairman of Oxford Civic Society, says the relief road was a proposal very much of its time.

He said: “The idea that the car is a good mode of transport for getting around cities is very much a 20th-century notion.

“This scheme was a reflection of its time and came very close to fruition but the tide turned just in the nick of time.

“There is now a realisation that our cities are places for people to live in and for people to enjoy living in.

“They are not places where all those things can be sacrificed for the convenience of the private car.

“The car has got its place, but it is not in the middle of a city.”

Instead, Mr Thompson says, the solution to congestion problems has to be found through efficient public transport schemes.

And since the Christ Church relief road idea died this is something Oxford has done relatively well, with the city’s park-and-ride — the first such system in the country — celebrating its 40th birthday this year.

City councillor Colin Cook, the city council’s executive board member for city development, said: “The arguments we now have are about discouraging people from bringing their cars into the city and encouraging them to use public transport.

“The first park-and-ride was in Oxford. We have pioneered the alternative and reaped the benefits.

“Clearly things could always be better but I think we have struck the right balance.”