Reg Little talks to the man behind a vision for Oxford that some view as a nightmare

Oxford is rather more used to producing big ideas than being used as a place to test other people’s.

But the city certainly made the ideal case study for David Rudlin, when he set his mind to showing how a garden city could double the size of a city to provide homes for 400,000 people.

Having designed the imaginary garden city of Uxcester, choosing to test how such a large settlement would work in Oxfordshire proved a winning and lucrative idea.

For it was to secure him the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize, said to be the second-biggest financial award in the field after the Nobel Prize.

His ideas, of course, failed to win him many friends amongst the vocal defenders of Oxford Green Belt, while those anxious to see an extension of Oxford and thousands of new homes built south of Grenoble Road could barely contain their glee when the award was announced.

Oxford was selected, Mr Rudlin and co-author Dr Nicholas Falk explained, on the basis that they believed: “In Oxfordshire, the case for growth is stronger than almost anywhere else, with house prices now 11 times average earnings.”

So they set about mapping the land around Oxford, ruling out areas within the extensive flood plain, areas of natural beauty and the sites of ecological interesting. They also mapped sites already considered for housing by Oxford City Council.

Thus the ‘Oxfordshire Snowflake’ plan was born. This involved expanding Oxford, building 50,000 homes near the city by building on the Green Belt, linked to the city centre by a tram or rapid bus system.

At the same time it set out how existing settlements such as Kidlington, Abingdon, Bicester, Didcot and Thame could also be expanded and linked by train or tram services.

Having given the county time to draw breath, Mr Rudlin this month presented himself in Oxford to set out his thoughts about combating Oxford’s housing crisis, and reveal more about the prize-winning vision produced by his consultancy, URBED.

Mr Rudlin was invited to address a seminar organised by Savills Oxford and solicitors Blake Morgan, entitled Looking Beyond the General Election.

He told the audience that taking a “few confident bites” out of the Green Belt in Oxfordshire was a far better option than the present approach of widespread new housing development.

He said: “People talk about the Green Belt as if it is like a dyke, and if there is a single crack, the whole thing will break. But we need to think about the Green Belt in terms of reconfiguring it.

“We all let our belts out a bit as we get older to allow a bit more flex, and in the same way the Green Belt should be allowed to flex. Rigid things break. All strong things need to flex — and we need that for the Green Belt.”

He described URBED’s winning proposals for modern garden cities, based upon doubling in size a fictitious town called Uxcester over 30 years, and showed how the approach could be directly applied to 40 towns in the UK, including Oxford.

But the only way to realise such an ambitious plan was to ensure access to transport infrastructure by allowing development on some Green Belt land.

“It is impossible to do it sustainably otherwise,” he said. “Politically that is completely impossible to say. Politicians of all persuasions have told me it is an impossible thing to say electorally. But I can, because I’m not a politician.

“To expand Uxcester we took 6,000 hectares. If you look at York or indeed Oxford Green Belt, that is about eight per cent of the Green Belt. That is the sort of proportion of the Green Belt that you need to take in order to double the size of these places.

“In York, it is actually quite easy. When you look at Oxford it is much more difficult because of factors such as flood plains, but even in Oxford there is scope to do that.”

The award-winning scheme produced by Mr Rudlin proposes satellite extensions of housing development radiating from Oxford in a snowflake shape.

Every home in the new extensions would be 20 minutes away from the town or city centre by tram, and within 10 minutes’ walking distance of a tram stop.

The co-author of the report, Nicholas Falk, was able to bring detailed knowledge about Oxford’s housing needs, having produced the Oxford Futures report earlier this year with Oxford Civic Society.

Mr Rudlin, a former planner at Manchester City Council, explained that although the satellite extensions would be built on Green Belt land, they would be surrounded by Green Belt and country parks and would therefore “touch the city very lightly”.

He argued that there is an accepted need for a substantial housing increase in Oxfordshire over the next 20 years.

“But under the present planning everyone would be affected by new development, but that would not be the case if use was made of some Green Belt land around Oxford.

“Every village and every town is going to have housing imposed upon it and not be happy about it.

“The deal is let us take all that pressure off those places, and let us take a confident bite out of the Green Belt, so that rather than nibbling around the edges of every settlement in Oxfordshire we take a few confident bites out of the Green Belt in areas that are lower impact in terms of who lives there, and we save all those other places from development.

“I’ve found it amazing the number of people who say ‘that makes perfect sense, but we couldn’t do it in our area’.”

The aim had originally been to explore the issues away from the politics and controversy that inevitably arise when dealing with a real place. But once shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize, the pair recognised the need to test it against a real city.

Later Mr Rudlin told The Oxford Times: “We spoke to a number of people in the councils and held a workshop with a range of local groups in July. However, I wouldn't suggest that our proposals are in any way endorsed by any of the councils. There wasn’t the time to do this.

“Our argument is in favour of extensions rather than new towns. We believe that there is scope to expand the city of Oxford and surrounding towns like Bicester and Didcot. However, fundamental to the argument is the need to invest in new public transport infrastructure.”

The site south of Grenoble Road, near the Kassam Stadium, is nevertheless, one of the extensions that is suggested.

Mr Rudlin made clear that the £250,000 prize may yet prove only the beginning, rather than the end of the project, revealing that he has offered to use part of the prize money to help develop the ideas further.

He said: “We are in discussions with a number of parties to agree how this might happen. If we are going to do this we want it to be helpful to all concerned by feeding into the ongoing planning process.”

So would he now be prepared to help Oxford City Council develop a city extension strategy? “As part of the discussions, yes, we would. Ideally we would want to do this without antagonising the other councils, which is why our initial approach has been to look slightly wider than just the city council.”

If he were to achieve that, maybe a Nobel Prize for Peace nomination could be in the offing.