3 FEBRUARY 1956, Page 15

SIR,—It would be easier to give wholehearted support to Mr.

Robert Blake in the Oxford roads controversy if one felt that Christ Church came to it with entirely clean hands.

In the last sentence of his article, Mr. Blake mentions a Cowley shopping centre, a need which is as obvious for the reduction of con- gestion in the centre of Oxford as it is for the convenience of the inhabitants of Cowley.

Yet as an old House man I regret to have to say that his reference becomes almost cyni- cal against the knowledge—to which Mr. Blake fails to call attention—that Christ Church has recently sold some of its property in the middle of Oxford for the extension of a moltiple store. Such a step seems almost as deplorable in all the circumstances as the replacement of the Clarendon Hotel by a new Woolworth's, the sanctioning of which will probably be the only thing for which Mr. Harold Macmillan will be 'remembered by posterity.—Yours faithfully,

F. H. C. TATHAM