Sir - Two of your recent correspondents seem to have no idea what's going on in the real world outside the inward-looking UK. Michael Heavey ascribes Britain's lack of work ethic to our joining the European Union, but this is patent nonsense. We had poor and declining productivity throughout the 20th century, due to low industrial investment, inadequate training and a work ethic that can best be described as abysmal. This didn't just happen in the 1970s when we joined the then Common Market.

And then A.Watson's outrage at probably the world's most exciting living architect's plans for building a modern building in Oxford, reflect a total lack of awareness of architecture elsewhere.

Apart from some outlying university halls of residence, the centre of our city is dead architecturally, with not a single modern building in sight. Doubtless A.Watson would have campaigned against the pyramid at the Louvre in Paris or the amazing modern buildings in the centre of Rotterdam - indeed every Dutch city - and the terrific modern British Embassy in Berlin.

Most European cities show that modern can exist happily alongside 18th- and 19th-century buildings. I imagine that, had A. Watson lived 150 years ago in Oxford, he would have thought the many buildings going up in the city then were a joke. One of the saddest aspects of Britain's urban landscape is the paucity of the modernist architecure that was prevalent in, say, Germany and Holland in the 1920s and 1930s.

We are always decades behind the rest of the world. And some of us loathe the pastiche architecture that Magdalen College's Longwall Street building represents. I would like to congratulate St Antony's College for its foresight and style.

Stuart Skyte, Oxford