Sir – Bill Bryson presents himself before the Oxford public as a supplicant pleading for them to reject the Government’s proposals to reform the country’s planning regulations (Letters, January 5).

In his latest reincarnation as the president of CPRE, he is just as eloquent as formerly as a vehement, satirical critic of modern Oxford’s obsession with building in the modernist style of architecture which resulted in one of Oxford’s glaringly incongruous carbuncles: the Warden of Merton’s lodging at the end of Merton Street.

Although not as bad as some modernist excesses, it was denigrated as being unworthy of such a prestigious collegiate body as Merton. Nobody would argue with Bryson’s argument that Carden and Godfrey, the college’s architects, had imposed a veritable ‘box of bricks’ at the internal angle of Merton Street, the resulting building having more in common with an electric sub-station, a kitchen toaster, or, worst of all, a council halfway house designed and built by its inmates. Pungent stuff for the fellows of Merton and Oxford planning authorities to stomach.

Until Bryson came along to point out such architectural solecisms, the Oxford public was blissfully unaware of any architectural misadventure at this college, or, indeed, at any other. But, then, Bryson relented somewhat in his critical tirade to concede that, bad as the Warden’s lodging undoubtedly was, it was by no means the worst of modern Oxford’s newest buildings. Thus he opens a whole new can of worms which The Oxford Times’s readers are invited to respond thus to Bryson’s ‘worst modern Oxford buildings’.

Subsequently, the Merton authorities have stolen Bryson’s thunder by re-facing the Warden’s lodging façade, over last summer, with a new, simulated stone frontage to match the adjacent college walls and structures. The revised architecture is more in keeping with the prevailing college vernacularities: a genuine response to respect the genius loci of Merton Street.

Tony Bintley, Abingdon