A NEW public route linking Walton Street and Woodstock Road is to be a key element in the first phase of Oxford Univer-sity’s £500m Radcliffe Infirmary development.

The university will submit a planning application this week to signal the start of one of the biggest building projects in Oxford city centre’s recent history.

The university is seeking approval for plans covering listed buildings and the southern section of the huge former hospital site. The first new buildings are expected to open in 2011.

The university is proposing a street for pedestrians and cyclists running from the Oxford University Press building along the RI site’s boundary with Somerville College. A northern route across the site from Cardigan Sreet to Woodstock Road will be provided at a later stage.

It is envisaged that the whole of the 10.5-acre site will eventually be accessible to the public during normal university working hours.

Phase one will see two large new buildings created for Somerville, providing a library and student accommodation, with an entrance into the college from the new Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, as the former hospital site will be known.

A university spokesman said: “The two new Somerville College buildings will provide animation to the new street. The buildings will be of a scale to match the existing buildings.”

The RI site was purchased by the university in 2003 and will become its main city centre campus. Almost half of the site space, including a two-floor library, will be provided underground. It took more than nine months to demolish the old hospital buildings.

The university has now set out its plans for the listed buildings that are to survive: the main Radcliffe Infirmary building, facing the Woodstock Road, and St Luke’s Chapel, dating from 1865.

The university spokes-man said: “The main objective for the proposals for the infirmary and St Luke’s Chapel is to strip back all the later additions to the exterior of the buildings and restore them to something close to the original layout.”

One of the major changes to the exterior will be the removal of 19th-century octagonal ‘sanitary towers’.

The spokesman added: “These octagonal towers were built to house bathrooms and lavatories. They may be an interesting piece of social history, but they do compromise the appearance of the west side of the infirmary.”

The hospital’s 19th-century, grade II-listed outpatient building on the Woodstock Road is also to be retained, with a new extension proposed. But it will detached from the main Radcliffe Infirmary building, which will be used for adminstrative offices. St Luke’s Chapel will be used as a new conference and performance facility.

Proposals for a sweeping boulevard running across the site from the Radcliffe Observatory to the Oxford University Press building were dropped from the original masterplan, after architects decided that smaller streets were more in keeping with central Oxford.

Future phases of the scheme will see a large mathematics institute built in the centre of the site, along with the university’s new humanities headquarters. Under the sale agreement the university will also build a new health centre for Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust, accessed from Walton Street.

Much of the funding of the work will come from the appeal announced by the university in May to raise at least £1.25bn.