A hungry beast. This was my observation to a fellow spectator as we stood awestruck watching giant teeth, like those of a fearsome dinosaur, chomping their way through Oxford’s unloved and soon to be no more Westgate car park.

The sight was strange and wonderful, in a way beautiful. The long neck stretched towards its prey and the head turned. Jaws yawned wide, then clamped shut on another large chunk of concrete. A couple of tugs and the mouthful was loose, crumbling in pieces, leaving behind a tangle of the steel wire that lent strength to the structure. Then came an attack on a descending column, which was gnawed rather as a dog might tackle a bone.

A powerful jet of water sprayed on the nodding head to combat dust as it pushed away the debris in sidewards sweeps. A rainbow appeared in the resulting mist.

Oh to have been the man in charge of the ravening animal! Some people want to be at the controls of a steam locomotive or jumbo jet; my fancy now would be for a Komatsu High-Reach Demolition Excavator.

Removal of the car park, a long-standing blot on the Oxford landscape, is in the experienced hands of Squibb, demolition experts since the end of the Second World War. Company founder Harry Squibb, who started out clearing rubbish from the docks with a horse and cart, made the company’s name in the clean-up following the Blitz.

A senior figure in the company chanced by, on my side of the safety fence, as I watched the progress of the work. Dave, an affable Geordie, told me it would be at least a six-week job. “It was very solidly built,” he said with the admiration of one who had started his working life in construction, not destruction. For comparison, the unlovely flats on the other side of the road were gone within a week.

Ninety per cent of the materials coming down are remaining on site to be used in the reconstruction. The wood, too, is to be recycled. I had forgotten how much timber there was in the outer ‘walls’ of the building.

I cannot deny there was a certain poignancy in watching the removal of a structure whose existence has exactly coincided in its 40-year life with my time in Oxford.

How new, how modern, it all looked as I rode for the first time on its shining escalators, which were out of use long before the end in this monument to the decade that taste forgot.

Crossing the bridge into the Westgate Centre you passed stairs on the right leading up to Scamps nightclub, the setting for such nights of revelry as the mid-seventies were able to offer in Oxford.

Beyond was Sainsbury’s, at the time the largest supermarket in the area (the company still had another in the old style at the top end of High Street).

Living out of town, I was car-borne in those days and often drove into the city centre to attend council meetings, inquests and various criminal courts.

For four weeks in 1983 the focus of interest at Oxford Crown Court was the car park itself, with two of its workers, both of them former policemen, on trial for stealing large amounts of the money paid by the parking public.

Car parks supervisor Ronald Sutton, 65, and chief cashier William Stone, 58, were both found guilty and jailed, for six and nine months respectively.

A third man, Charles Finley Smith, a 52-year-old city council maintenance worker, pleaded guilty to theft – of £11,500, a huge sum then – and was jailed for 15 months.

The case was unusual at the time in making use of video footage showing the thieves at work – and thieving.

With suspicions having been aroused (and not before time, you might think, considering the sums involved), cameras were installed in the ‘golf ball’ control centre at the back of the car park.

As a reporter covering the trial, I still remember the impact on the court and jury of seeing with what abandon the defendants made off with, literally, their sacks of money.

Passing sentence, Judge Kenneth Mynett QC alluded to this: “We have watched video films for many hours,” he said.

“They show that both you men were helping yourselves to public money almost as a matter of routine.”