OXFORD University’s £200m plans to redevelop the Radcliffe Infirmary site look set to be approved.

The university wants to create a humanities building with an underground library and a five-storey maths department at the former Woodstock Road hospital.

The 10-acre site, between Woodstock Road and Walton Street, would become known as the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter.

A planning officers’ report to city councillors said the scheme should be approved.

The report said a series of small streets running across the site would ensure the new university campus would be successfully “integrated into the wider urban fabric of the city”.

Planning officers also said that rather than seeking to create “grand vistas at every opportunity”, the scheme seemed to be “very much within the Oxford tradition”, with areas of lawn planned for the north of the site near the Observatory gardens of Green Templeton College.

The Maths Institute would have five levels above ground, with one basement accommodating lecture theatres and the second an underground car park for 53 vehicles which would serve the whole site.

The £90m humanities building, at the heart of the new quarter, would have five floors above a major new library, spread over two underground floors. The main entrance would be in a new public square with a central lantern building roofed in copper forming another striking element.

The listed Infirmary building on Woodstock Road would be used for offices, with the former out-patients building providing a new home for the Ruskin School of Art.

The listed chapel would be converted to house meetings, exhibitions and performances.

Two pedestrian and cycle routes would be created linking Woodstock Road and Walton Street, the southern one being open 24 hours a day. The university is pressing for some limitations on the northern route.

The site would be essentially car free at surface level.

The planning application will go to the council’s central, south and west area committee on Tuesday and the north area committee next Thursday, before going to the strategic development control committee on May 27.

The university said building work could begin by the end of this year and be completed by 2013.

Prof Anthony Monaco, chairman of the university’s Radcliffe Observatory Quarter board, said: “This offers state-of-the-art teaching space, while offering new avenues through the site, exciting courtyards, gardens and squares, all with views of the Radcliffe Observatory.”