This letter is from 2024.

A decade ago Botley residents hoped redevelopments would improve their neighbourhood. This happened instead: s Doric wasn’t the developer of the whole site. Instead, it flipped the land with planning permits to others who were incapable of synchronising their work. Construction went on forever. Despaired residents sold their properties, which became dense apartment blocks. The area is called Oxford’s Croydon: ten years on, still a construction site s Gridlock on the Botley interchange has become permanent; pollution has reached record levels s The six-screen cinema opened as cinema attendance plunged. The huge space now stands empty s The supermarket suffered when buying food went online. It had to be halved and is the size of the old Co-op s Independent businesses couldn’t survive the endless construction and escalating rents s The new for-profit gym first took business from Brooke’s Westminster campus sport facilities, which closed; then went bust. Youngsters from the dense and amenity-poor Tilbury and Lime Road developments and the newly-erected flats go elsewhere for exercise.

s As the West Way Concern local residents warned in 2014, the 550 student warrens the Vale approved were used by neither university. They were converted into 150 apartments with no parking. Whether this was part of a cynical plot from the beginning, or a planning blunder, continues to be a debate.

s The 30 cramped flats were an inadequate replacement for the 60 homes for the elderly demolished with Field House. The shameful treatment of those residents is still today referred to in debates on the state of our society. The one good thing is that this saga put Botley on the map: the half-baked development won the architectural ‘Carbuncle of the Year’ award in 2018 that Castle Mill just missed in 2013.

R and G Ramirez, Cumnor Rise Road, Botley