Sir – I am delighted to see that Oxford is once again in the forefront of architecture, in pole position for the prestigious Carbuncle Cup (Report, June 20), much sought after by architects who wish to expunge the tedious ‘heritage’ of the past and replace it with the onward march of student housing and other masterpieces that represent the realities of the present century.

Other prestigious projects in the pipeline look likely to follow in the heady footsteps of the Port Meadow Carbuncles.

The Blavatnik Centre’s wonderful ‘double dustbin’ design in Jericho will show up the scruffy corroded stone of the tired old ex-church next door, currently Freud’s Café, for what it is. Science Oxford’s Magnet, not only actually requires a boring old building to be demolished, but also imposes a shiny new foreground to that tedious green hump known as ‘Castle Mound’.

This has the added gain that the Register Office, formerly housed in the crisp modern surroundings backstairs in the Westgate, conveniently adjacent to the multi-storey car park, will be evicted from its current, dull Victorian surroundings, and can perform gay and other marriages in a fitting 21st-century concrete basement in County Hall.

I look forward to Oxford’s colleges replacing their gloomy medieval anachronisms with glowing steel and glass showpieces, as pioneered by Oxford Brookes on Headington Hill. Scrap the past, build the future — let us rename the throwback ‘Ox-Ford’ and celebrate instead dynamic ‘Diesel-Flyover’, our great city of contemporary college construction culture.

Dr Anthony Cheke, Oxford