Sir — I urge all Oxford residents to contact our city council and urge them to begin the process of revoking, or discontinuing, planning permission for the current University development adjacent to Port Meadow, on Roger Dudman Way.

I do so with great reluctance as a senior member of the University but there is a greater public interest here than the short-term interest of the University. Anyone who has either walked recently on Port Meadow or even waited for a London train at the rail station will have seen the full horror of the vertical scale of this development, which is a far more important flaw than the frankly mediocre design of the whole scheme.

Its roofline is visible from the furthest corners of Port Meadow or Burgess Field; it is visible even from Binsey. Matthew Arnold or Gerard Manley Hopkins knew these views — in their former state. It is astonishing that an institution such as Oxford University, dedicated to humane values in their widest sense, could have perpetrated such a visual disaster on one of the world’s historic landscapes. It is like building a skyscraper beside Stonehenge. I accept that the University had an admirable aim, adequate provision for graduate student accommodation and that those concerned were honourable people; but honourable people have a duty to own up to mistakes. This has been a tragedy of good intentions but it is not too late to halt that tragedy.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford