Sir — Oxford is short of public open space. Charming medieval towns too often have only a wide main road for a market-place. Such dual use is impractical and in Oxford only Broad Street and St Giles are wide enough for it.

Cornmarket can be almost as constricted by people standing about as it used to be by vehicles. Geoff Soames remembers ‘some years ago… you published a letter… suggesting [The New Bodleian] be demolished’.

That was in 2007 and 2010, when I wrote proposing that most of the site be opened as a public square, retaining the three basement levels beneath.

As well as increasing useful open space, it would have set off Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building, which like the Old Ashmolean (the Museum of the History of Science) and Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre is Grade I listed. Despite being by Giles Gilbert Scott, the New Bodleian is only Grade II listed, not even Grade II*. That is because it is ugly.

It is listed more for Scott’s fame than any intrinsic merit. ‘Experts’ should not dictate our tastes but when Nevill Coghill, Howard Colvin, James Morris, Nikolaus Pevsner, Thomas Sharp and Geoffrey Tyack all explain how and why it is ugly, we should listen. Coursed rubble is the wrong masonry for central Oxford. The details are ashlar, but in lumpen, debased mimicry of earlier styles. The low upstairs windows remind me of a Georgian jail. In the 18th century, first Hawksmoor and then Edward Tatham (later Rector of Lincoln College) proposed a new square at Carfax. In the 1940s Thomas Sharp proposed six new squares but with too much demolition. Philanthropists too often want buildings as their legacy.

Replacing buildings with open space costs less and is needed more. That is what the next Garfield Weston or Julian Blackwell should offer Oxford.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford