IT IS very good to learn that Debbie Dance, director of the Oxford Preservation Trust, is pressing Oxford City Council to reject the Westgate Alliance’s, in effect blank-page plans, for a refurbished and extended Westgate Centre (£400m Westgate plans ‘bad for heritage’ says city trust, December 16).

The outline and very loose-limbed plans are, according to the Alliance development manager, Sara Fuge, necessary because ‘they need this level of flexibility as they do not yet know who the tenants will be other than John Lewis’.

So much, then, as Ms Dance reminds the city council, for policies in Oxford on height and heritage; so much for details.

What we do know is that John Lewis will claim an overbearing 10,000 square feet for its ‘super’ store and that the Alliance’s primary concern must be to maximise its investment by achieving as much retail square footage as possible. Great.

An alternative: demolish all of the existing Westgate and open the spaces achieved to co-housing clusters, to shops and businesses run by local people, to workshops. In this way something of the old St Ebbe’s could be recaptured (see John Mogey’s 1956 Family and Neighbourhood).

This won’t, of course, be an option in Oxford’s bid to achieve a “world-quality” shopping centre, measured, it seems, against existing retail mutations in Swindon, Reading, and Milton Keynes, with minimum wage and zero hours jobs... exactly what Oxford needs.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH

Bowness Avenue

Headington

Oxford