Model revives memories of old railway station (From The Oxford Times)

"Rewley Road station served Oxford for 100 years, from 1851 until 1951. The site is now the Said Business School"

That's a nice way of putting it! Syrian born Wafic Said made a massive amount of money from this country's biggest weapons deal when Said was used as a broker between the Conservative government and Saudi Arabia for the well known oppressive regime to buy weapons from us.

People tried for about 20 years to have the deal investigated but the investigation was dropped after Saudi Arabia effectively suggested we'd end up with another terrorist attack.

Eventually the investigation took place and BAE systems was fined for having used dodgy accounts in Switzerland for the deal.

When the Business School was proposed local people attempted to stop it and protect the old station but alas, money talks and the listed building was removed from Oxford in order to allow Wafic Said and University of Oxford to go ahead.

Now we have a glorious Business School practically built on money from death and destruction in another country. Removing the use of land for community use and placing it in the hands of those driven by profit and no morals.

Nice model though. I like train sets.

Rewley Road Station was also removed without official approval because there was no public inquiry. Even though it was a Grade II listed building.

Geoff Roberts wrote:
Rewley Road Station was also removed without official approval because there was no public inquiry. Even though it was a Grade II listed building.

Those of us who have been here a while know that the University has the final say on any planning matter. After all, it owns most of the land and lets the council manage it on their behalf. They will threaten the council until they get their own way. Just look at the fiasco over the student accommodation levy; how dare the council try and help local people with the dire housing shortage in Oxford!

Listed or not, the former railway station had become an eyesore, a decayed timber building that was sadly unrecognisable and was used as a tyre-change garage in the seventies and eighties. Hardly on the National Trust cream-teas circuit, or even the Fred Dibnah steam heritage trail. Yes, it would have been cool to have seen it preserved and restored on site. That didn't happen, but it was disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere, which is some consolation. Unfortunately, the Said building that replaced it is hardly an imaginative addition to the "gateway" to the city.

'Eyesore' is subjective and allowing this to happen when buildings get in a state of neglect is not really acceptable as far as I'm concerned. It's possibly what's happened to quite a few of the buildings and bits of land. Neglected, perhaps even willfully, just so it can be said that nothing more can be done and there's no longer any choice but to remove it and sell off the land.

The point I'm making is that eyesore or not, big business and rich investors should not be allowed to do what they want and muscle in.

We're potentially facing a planning and housing disaster in this city. There may come a time when we suddenly realise that we need small businesses, schools, manufacturing and so on to be built but there's nowhere to build them because we've all been marched down a road that there's no going back down without demolishing everything and starting again.

Just look at the impact of closing schools on roads for example. Everyone can see it, when schools are on holiday the roads aren't so bad. Yet we've allowed our council to, for example, sell off Temple Cowley School and let developers build who then maximise profit on dwellings and leases.

The only people who really win are the developers.

Meanwhile the need for community facilities increase as the land is used to squeeze more people on in order to maximise profit.

Perhaps ironically it was Said Business School that anaylsed data about the cost of the Olympics and told us how vastly over budget it was.

This is all fast being obsene in my eyes.

...and it's Wafic Said who is trying to get a University Building named after his heroine, Margaret Thatcher.

This people are sucking the life out of our communities and making us enjoy it.