Sir – Cornmarket has numerous good buildings and 17 are listed, but a few others are ugly and intrusive.

Nikolaus Pevsner called Clarendon House one of Oxford’s finest post-war commercial buildings. Built for Woolworth in 1956–57, it has light, fresh lines, buff limestone to suit Oxford and turquoise-grey slate panels for relief. No concrete is exposed, save for some bad reconstituted stone tacked on to Gap’s shopfront.

Woolworth had the historic Clarendon Hotel demolished to build it, and a 12th-century cellar beneath half-smashed for one of the new foundation columns. Despite this, Clarendon House deserves Pevsner’s compliment “very tactful and elegant”.

Modernity isn’t the problem. 47–51 Cornmarket was built in 1871. Yellow brick with buff limestone can look good, but this building is a ponderous, cluttered mess.

Jeremy Smith’s critique of Cornmarket (First Person, September 20) exceeds 450 words but is too vague and tangential to define what he dislikes or why, save that there are “two concrete tumours”.

One must be Northgate House; the tidy, white concrete block on the corner of Market Street. The other may be the former Littlewood’s shop (now mostly McDonald’s) whose vertical concrete fins Pevsner called “showy”. I enjoy it, and McDonald’s current retro styling compliments it.

The filthy grey concrete only needs cleaning. Smith thinks Cornmarket too embarrassing for foreign visitors. But Oxford heaves with 9.5 million UK and overseas visitors a year!

Cornmarket’s worst 20th-century buildings are small. HMV has two together: one red brick, the other a 1970s’ fortress with buff limestone panels, dark surrounds and tiny windows. And 4 Cornmarket (David Clulow) is tacky; re-faced with modernist grey limestone but with buff limestone Art Déco left exposed above. But these are details.

Smith wants “Oxford” (the city council?) to “bulldoze” Cornmarket and replace it with “a sparrow”. It has better things to do.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford