Sir – Surely there has never been more column space, and invective, as that devoted to the Castle Mill Flats controversy.

At this point I need to insert a warning: anyone of a sensitive disposition should stop reading, for I am about to utter a heresy!

I do actually like the look of the Castle Mill flats, and believed them to be an enhancement to the view.  Yes, I have actually seen them, from a distance and from close up; which I am not convinced is the case for all your correspondents.

For example another, unremarked fact is that immediately to the left of the flats is another, red brick, block, almost the same height, which I think looks frightful.  But that is just my opinion.

There lies the nub of the matter. Architecture is so much about personal taste: one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Not only that, but tastes in architecture, as in anything, change over the years. I hear so much about this or that new building ‘not being in keeping’, but when it comes down to it at the time when they were being built the same could have been said about so many of the Oxford colleges which are now such a delight to the eyes.

There was one classic example: when Keble College was built many who deplored its style, and at one time there was an undergraduate society ‘for the demolition of Keble College’ (shades of some of the more extreme of the protesters who would like Castle Mill Flats to be demolished!) We cannot allow the architecture of Oxford to become fossilised in  someone’s perception of an ‘Oxford college style’; for a start there is no such thing. The worst modern buildings are not those of a radical architecture but those which are  a pastiche of what someone imagines to be some kind of a classical style.

Indeed, such is the speed at which tastes change that I would not be surprised if, assuming that the militant wing do not get their way and the Castle Mill flats remain, that in 20 or 30 years’ time they will be regarded as such an ornament to the landscape of Oxford that they will be listed buildings.

Andrew Baker, Oxford