ARTS & AMUSEMENTS

Objections to Oxford

By TERENCE BENDIXSON

XFORD must be looking forward to the kJ public inquiry that will start there next Tuesday. Having made itself the Stratford of these hieratic performances it has had the mis- fortune to be without one for several years. The Christ Church Meadow road has accordingly dropped out of the top ten of high-table con- versation. Rumour has it that Lord Franks was asked to inquire into the University to fill the resulting gap.

Next week's inquiry, however, casts its net a bit wider than roads. It will be about Oxford Council's plans for the whole of the city up until 1981 and should provide fine grounds for academic acrimony. The proposals cover a period likely to accommodate incomes growth, social change and expanding car ownership on a huge scale. One might expect therefore plans for an Oxford appreciably different from the present one.

Population, for instance, is expected to grow from its 1961 total of 106,124 to 142,459 in 1981. That is about 34 per cent. Yet despite change on this scale the development plan contains no policy for adapting the town's geography, or its overall sculpture, or the means for getting about it. There are going to be 36,335 people born in the city or immigrating to it, but there is no indication of where they will live. The written analysis that is part of the development plan review says merely that the majority 'will have to be housed outside the city.' It goes on to explain that the counties of Oxfordshire and Berkshire and the City Council are jointly considering where to put them. When a decision will be made is not revealed. Meanwhile, the villages adjoining the city are suffering from thoughtless and scruffy elephantiasis. Such is the fruit of having no policy for adapting the city's geography to the facts of growth.

This is not entirely Oxford's fault. It just happens to be saddled with boundaries and planning scope that bear no relationship to its function as a regional capital with a hinterland stretching in some directions up to twenty miles. Oxford, like every city in the land, is in the position of a householder who has control over his living-room and kitchen, but not at all over the bedrooms, bathroom and garden. Yet a city has not only a spatial relationship to the countryside it is planted in; it has internal composition as well. Oxford's present internal form is that of a wheel with a lot of its spokes missing. The spokes which are there—the Abingdon, Cowley, Headington, Banbury and other main roads—feed traffic in and out 'of the town. Astride them, in patterns that owe as much to the vagaries of evolution and the economics of speculative buildings as to the need for good conditions, lie houses, shops and work- places. The result is a mixture of inconvenience and downright dangerousness.

It might be expected that the City Council would plan to improve this situation over the next twenty years. Richard Hare, a Balliol don, will complain at the public inquiry that it does not. Buchanan has described how to go about it. The first step is to identify zones where good living or working conditions are important and then start easing all through traffic to the edges of them. The outcome would be a cellular city resembling lily-pads on a pond, with each pad representing a precinct for living and working in, and the water in between providing for speedy communication. Every old city in the country will have to accept such a design sooner or later. It is this century's equivalent to the Victorian revolution in drains and it is likely to prove no less important to public health.

In a city with a famous skyline one would also expect urban sculpture, the physique of the town's buildings (as opposed to its footprint or planning) to be considered creatively. In fact, the Council's declared policy is concerned only to preserve the supremacy of the dreaming spires. The method chosen is to limit high buildings for three-quarters of a mile from Carfax and pre- serve views across the suburbs to the centre from six vantage points in the surrounding countryside. Elsewhere, applications to build high will be considered on their merits. The outcome is likely to be what already exists in London—a thin and indiscriminate stubble of towers, everywhere domineering and nowhere clustered into Manhattanesque drama. Yet as long ago as 1960, Tom Hancock, in his Proposals for the Future City, done for Townmaker Limited, showed clusters of towers up the Banbury Road.

The object of making these criticisms is not to pick Oxford out for special condemnation. The irony is that few towns in England are being treated with comparable care. As Geoffrey Moorhouse in the Guardian and Ian Nairn in the Observer have recently shown, the individu- ality of. town after town from • Worcester to Harwich is being dissolved before the eyes of its inhabitants. The reason is a mixture of un- willingness and impotence on the part of town councils, and the sulphuric acid of development by absentee financiers. Oxford has done a great deal better than most. The new shopping centre at Cowley, designed by the City architect and planning officer Douglas Murray, has real quality. The High Street is being given the kid-glove treatment it deserves. Town footpaths are being extended. The missing part of the plan is city- wide policies for coping with growth, for im- proving the quality of environment and creating modern beauty in the suburbs comparable with that of the dreaming spires.

The review of Oxford's development plan does not even recognise these as the outstanding needs. The frontispiece of its written analysis is a drawing of the route proposed by the minister in 1962 for a road across Christ Church Meadow• Slightly modified, this route has now been accepted by the City Council. At the public inquiry Colin Buchanan will represent the Uni- versity in opposing this road. His argument is conveniently set out in a paragraph of the Buchanan Report of 1963. Briefly, it is that if traffic is restricted from using the High Street, the alternative route can be as circuitous as you like.

Recognition that through Buchanan the High Street faction could have its precinct and the Meadow faction its idyll brought the old inter- college conflict to a sudden end. For a time it seemed as if the University was unanimous, but

now a new problem is emerging. Buchanan will be objecting to the development plan and in par- ticular to its road system, but is not likely to take a chalk from his pocket and show how it should be planned. He is a man of science and his philosophy is 'survey before plan.' The Road Research Laboratory's computations, on which the Council's present proposals are based, are obsolete. Therefore a new survey will be needed city before Oxford can be 'redesigned in the light of pad technical and emotional changes to cars and

king planning since Traffic in Towns was published.

for Oxford City Council will press for action now.

the It will point to the city's present confusion, to oner the cost of delay and to the fact that the Meadow the road follows the minister's suggestion. And it ikely is certain to get some support in this form from the High Street colleges which long to be freed ould from pounding traffic.

f the It will be sad if the minister is deceived by it or this special pleading. The length of time that fact, it has taken Oxford Council to carry out its only planning review (since 1961) means that it is )fires. bringing out a piston-engined model in a jet age.

s for Not just the Meadow road but Oxford's entire pre- urban pattern and road network are obsolete.

:ntre Something like a crash programme sponsored iding by the City Council, BMC, the University build Geography School and Oxford School of Archi- The lecture at Headington is needed to revise the is in present survey and match idealism with action.

e of Yet there is more time than most people

there realise for Oxford to draw up a new plan. Even it as if the Minister of Housing does approve the

osals road across Christ Church Meadow, it is un-

iaker likely to be built for several years. Lord Lindgren, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of

Transport, said recently that no more money could be spared for road building than has already been allocated in the current five:year programme. And., the Meadow road is not in that programme.