Bill Bryson

A decade or so ago Oxford's planning panjandrums were deftly satirised by Bill Bryson in his Notes from a Small Island:
'You know, we've been putting up handsome buildings since 1264; let's have an ugly one for a change.' Then the planning authorities had to say, “Well, why not? Plenty worse in Basildon.”’

‘Then,’ Bryson continues, ‘the whole of the city -students, dons, shopkeepers, office workers, members of the Oxford Preservation Trust - had to acquiesce and not kick up a fuss. Multiply this by, say, 200 or 300 and 400 and you have modern Oxford. And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, well-preserved cities in the world? I'm afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.’

Bryson asked ‘What sort of mad seizure was it that gripped the city's planners, architects and college authorities in the1960s and 1970s? Did you know that it was once seriously proposed to tear down Jericho, a district of fine artisans' homes, and to run a bypass right across Christ Church Meadow? These ideas weren't just misguided, they were criminally insane.’

Bryson acknowledges Oxford's many virtues: in his view ‘it has moments of unutterable beauty’ and ‘a scattering of prospects that melt the heart’ and he speaks too of ‘being immersed in an architectural treasure house, one of the densest assemblages of historic buildings in the world’, but he also warns that in the light of the city's planners' appalling lapses over the years there is little room for complacency.