TESCO is one of the commercial juggernauts of our time. There is a reason it has been so successful – it has a business plan and it executes it without distraction.

So its relentless pursuit of opening a store on the dilapidated Fox and Hounds site should come as no surprise to locals who have already fought it three times and won.

There was optimism after the last application to build a store there, on the corner of Abingdon Road and Weirs Lane, that Tesco would not be back. That has proved, unsurprisingly, ill-founded.

People living in South Oxford are quite right to band together to fight the new applications should they feel it will adversely affect their neighbourhood.

But there should be a pragmatic view guiding that. The likelihood is Tesco will not go away any time soon and so each application should be opposed only if the specifics merit it.

To simply fight an application because it is from Tesco will inevitably end in defeat.

The supermarket giant has shown it is quite happy to leave this eyesore – a horrendous blight on the neighbourhood and one of the main entrance points to our city – to fester because, to it, the Fox and Hounds is out of sight and therefore out of mind.

Certainly neighbours should fight the good fight, but we need some resolution because hoping Tesco will disappear is not going to happen.