Take a look — it may be your last look — at one of the most important buildings in Oxford. It is the city’s Register Office, built exactly a century ago to the design of architect William Austin Daft. Oxford City Council wants done with it. Ta-ta, then. Lord Foster awaits with his £5m Magnet science discovery centre.

Important, I said of the building. That’s right. Important, apart from anything else — and I have not seen this mentioned before — for the memories it holds for the many folk who were married there. Confetti-showered, they posed for photographs on its steps — buxom brides blushing, bridegrooms’ bellies bulging in fancy waistcoats expanded by what was available from the Duke’s Cut (once the Queen’s Arms) opposite.

No swanky church weddings, these. I don’t imagine the likes of Pippa Middleton, a serial attender at occasions matrimonial, will have been there much, if ever. But thousands upon thousands of Oxford and Oxfordshire people have been. Seeing the celebrations — as I so often have, walking into town — always gladdens the heart. The office’s ochre stone walls have supplied a backdrop down the years to the sort of scene described so well by Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings: “The fathers with broad belts under their suits/And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;/An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,/The nylon gloves and jewelry-substitutes,/The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochers that/Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.”

The Register Office matters, in short, to ‘ordinary people’, in that disparaging phrase often used by their supposed superiors. These are a section of society that Oxford’s Labour-controlled city council has always affected to represent, to defend the interests of. Being solicitous where the rights of the working class are concerned is something to be expected, surely, from all who purport to be socialists. The right to have one’s memories preserved is a very obvious one.

That the Register Officer is a handsome building cannot be denied. Its attractions were summarised well in a recent article in Private Eye. This magazine, it should be remembered, has a long tradition of fighting to save threatened buildings. Its first architectural correspondent was Sir John Betjeman. Its latest, ‘Piloti’, wrote: “Made of two fine local stones and superbly detailed in a Free Classical style, it was built in 1912-13 and is typical of civic buildings of the time in being both dignified and cheerful.”

Recommending the listing that would have saved it from the demolition gang, English Heritage said it “makes a real contribution to the area and has been in public use for decades as well as forming a group with nearby municipal buildings . . . the castle ruins and the prison. It forms a positive focus of several key long and short views in the area, at this ‘gateway’ to Oxford. Its demolition would cause significant harm to the conservation area.”

All pretty obvious, I should have thought. And yet Maria Miller, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, saw fit — so expert is she in these matters — to reject this application.

In doing so, she doubtless heeded the advice of Oxford City Council. This stressed the importance of the redevelopment of the site. “The listing of the building,” it said, “would potentially have a significant detrimental effect upon a major opportunity for the cultural and economic growth of the city”.

I do not trust the city council on planning matters. Can anyone, bearing in mind the dreadful decision over Oxford University’s Port Meadow flats and the scarcely less shameful approval of the Blavatnik School of Government building in Jericho? I shall always remember the vigour with which officers argued for the destruction of the River Hotel in Botley Road. Happily, their advice was not followed — but I still fear for the future of this fine riverside building and its handsome but dilapidated neighbours.