Opportunities for me to disagree with our excellent Jericho and Osney ward councillor Susanna Pressel are few and far between, but one has certainly arisen concerning the premises of Movies Video Rental in Walton Street. The shop, which had traded for more than 20 years, closed on Sunday of last week, a victim of changing trends in home entertainment. Susanna told one of our reporters: “I think it will be a loss to Jericho. As far as I know it was quite well used and I hope something similar will reopen.”

For my part, I see the closure of the shop as no loss at all, sad though it must be for owners Jenny and Leo Edwards. And as for something similar reopening, this is the last thing I would wish for. In all my years in Oxford the shop has struck me as — to borrow a phrase from the Prince of Wales — a monstrous carbuncle, a hideous intrusion on a fine row of late Georgian houses, most of which have been splendidly spruced up in recent years (‘well presented’, in estate-agent-speak). The best thing that could happen, surely, would be for the shop to be turned back into the house that it once was (in appearance, at any rate, there being evidence of commercial occupation from as early as the mid-19th century).

How the wide-windowed shop came into existence in what is so clearly a residential location is something that has long puzzled me. It need not have done, in fact, since the answer was discoverable in 30 minutes of rootling through the cuttings files in our library at Newspaper House.

It is a story that dates back exactly 50 years, to 1963, when Mr R.C. Taylor, a partner in Gardiners, Opthalmic Opticians, clashed with Oxford City Council over the matter. Hitherto, the premises had been operated more in the style of a consulting room or surgery. Mr Taylor’s ambition for a more obviously commercial mode of business prompted the council to insist that this would require planning permission for shop use. Mr Taylor appealed against the decision, and won. In view of the detrimental effect his victory had on the look of this handsome street, it is instructive to note some of the arguments that objectors brought before the public inquiry.

One of them was immediate neighbour, Dr A. Sillery (who might not have been best pleased by then to be sharing his name with the manipulative Oxford don of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novel sequence).

He told the Inspector for the Minister of Housing and Local Government that “the discreet display of spectacles incidental to the business of the optician” would be replaced by “a show of trade”.

Sir John Nicholl, of No 11 — Walton Street evidently had its classy residents, even then — claimed in a written submission that there was a “radical difference” between the professional use of a building and its use for ordinary trading.

Mr Taylor was represented by the barrister Leo Clark, who in later decades was well known to a generation of felons, among others, as the principal judge at Oxford Crown Court.

He argued that the building was assessed as a shop for rating purposes, and that before Mr Taylor bought the premises, they had been leased from St John’s College, with documents that described them in the same way.

His arguments clearly held sway with the inspector, despite some sound sense brought to the proceedings by the council’s chief assistant solicitor, Mr A.P.M. Nixson. He said that if it was accepted that the opthalmic opticians’ premises constituted a shop, many such premises in residential areas might be converted into shops in future. Three months after the hearing, the Minister of Housing and Local Government allowed the appeal, having decided that “the change proposed would not be a material one”. The action of Sir Keith Joseph would appear to reflect the same contempt for local democracy in planning matters that is shown by his Tory successors of 2013.