IN CAMBRIDGE two days ago, I ran into an old friend who worked and lived in Oxford for 20 years.

On a recent visit to her sometime home she had walked around the edges of the emerging Westgate Mark II. Her response: “The worst thing to have happened to Oxford in the last 1,000 years!”

Yes, an overreaction, but given the perilous, and too often fatal, consequences of Oxford’s overburdened traffic system, it must wondered how Sara Fuge’s 15 million visitors a year are going to get in and out of the city. Pint pots and all that.

Yet the Westgate Alliance development manager Ms Fuge is reported (‘New call by Westgate to make Queen Street pedestrian zone’, Oxford Mail, May 13) to be arguing that keeping buses out of Queen Street will be “vital” to the “success of the centre and encouraging people to explore the rest of Oxford”.

A grand design or a potential nightmare, with stresses on Oxford’s public transport system which can only grow with those 15 million visitors? With pressures on a city centre which is not by historical design amenable to huge numbers of visitors, whatever the perceived economic boosts such numbers might bring: out of chaos nothing good can come!

Oxford is not a metropolis but a smallish city, so for some, including my Cambridge friend, the Westgated city centre could become a no-go area!

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH Bowness Avenue, Headington