Sir – Surely the ‘no plebs’ signs opponents to the new housing development in Sutton Courtenay (Report, August 27) would more honestly be placed by the council at the major roundabouts and exits from Oxford’s ring road, and at Oxford Station.

As someone raised in Oxford, and who now visits three or four times a year it is striking how working class people are increasingly banished from the centre of Oxford, and being forced to its periphery.

Iconic sites of working class labour and pleasure are gone from the city – Lucy’s, Morrell’s, The Manor football ground.

Conversely middle-class occupations, particularly associated with the University, burgeon within the city. This gentrification of labour is symbolised most vividly by the conversion of the Clarendon Press Institute in Walton Street from the working men’s club it was when I was growing up, to the home of the Faculty of Linguistics.

In parallel, pedestrianisation and traffic calming measures are a vehicle (forgive the pun) for the residential gentrification of the city centre, and the removal of its working class – Walton Street and Jericho being the epitome. Elsewhere, the preferred modes of working class travel – bus and foot – are always ‘a problem’.

Bus travellers are forced to backstreet rendezvous with buses which follow the most tortuous and slow routes through the city in order to keep the centre pure for private business, the university, and its upper-class residents.

Pedestrians arriving at Oxford rail station are treated with the utmost contempt in the ‘temporary’ roadworks, around which it is impossible to carry a suitcase to the bus stop to, say, Headington.

I am not sure is there is such a word as ‘classist’, but if ever a city was ‘institutionally classist’, Oxford is it; and it is a worsening problem.

Bill Cooke
Manchester