Prof Sally Mapstone was a highly inspiring tutor at Oxford University, teaching Mediaeval literature with a depth of understanding and enthusiasm that gave me as an Eng Lit student a lasting appreciation of some wonderful and unique historic texts.

I wonder how she might view it if, in the name of development, someone scribbled with a cheap biro over original literary texts on the grounds that times have moved on and students need notes made for them on the texts as time is too short for thinking to take place. I see little difference between this and the blotting out of the sight of the celebrated Dreaming Spires and the Grade I listed St Barnabas Tower from Port Meadow Scheduled Monument, where impacts by cheap blocks on views that were very highly valued by uncountable people have been officially categorised without exception as ‘substantially adverse’.

Have history and heritage come to mean less in the face of today’s unbridled desire for economic growth at all costs, or are they just unimportant when impacting outside of Oxford University’s own territory?

Sushila Dhall, Stable Close, Rewley Park

Today’s letters

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