OLD battle lines were drawn as a former Oxford city councillor hit out at the owner of Headington’s Shark House on Channel 4.

Oxford Mail columnist Bill Heine and the 25ft fibreglass shark model were featured on the primetime programme Damned Designs.

The show, which broadcast Tuesday night, retold the five-year saga of the BBC Oxford presenter’s battle with Oxford City Council in the 1980s and early 1990s to keep the shark on 2 New High Street.

The shark was commissioned by the Balliol College graduate in 1986 and was erected on the 41st anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.

After the art piece, called Untitled 1986, was put up, the Headington resident spent years battling the city council and the planning inspectorate over an order to remove it.

Former councillor and vehement opponent of the shark John Power told the show: “That’s an abomination.

Oxford’s known as the city of dreaming spires and that certainly isn’t one of the spires, it’s an eyesore.

“If we didn’t put some kind of check on things like this we’d have all sorts of things on top of the roofs of this city.”

Eventually the former minister of state for environment, Michael Heseltine, intervened and granted the shark retrospective planning permission in 1992.

The former Henley MP said: “I cannot believe that the purpose of the planning laws is to enforce boring, mediocre, design.”

During the programme, Mr Heine added: “This is no longer just a house, or just a shark, it’s a piece of sculpture. I didn’t realise the consequences of this [at the time].”