The designs for the unfolding Westgate development are beginning to seem completely soulless compared with the spiritually inspired and timelessly beautiful mediaeval Oxford buildings.

It is starting to look as if the only thing deserving the word ‘flagship’ will be the notorious traffic jams greeting the visitors (and everyone else) from an encircling radius of at least a mile before they even reach the area.

Here are my questions: 1) No doubt too late to keep saying, but the plan is too big for the area. Why does John Lewis need to take up a space virtually as large as the whole of the existing Westgate Centre?

2) There is no room for the unprecedented volume of traffic that will be drawn to the centre.

3) St Ebbes itself needs more housing, but although the importance of strong communities keeps being talked about, the existing ones continue to be destroyed. There was no need to demolish the £3m-worth flats in Abbey Place, especially as the existing tenants were told they could not be rehoused locally and some of them had to move outside Oxfordshire altogether.

4) Norfolk Street would be much easier to drive along if left in a straight line without making an abrupt turn past Tennyson Lodge and what is left of ‘Paradise’ Square. Has this been discussed in depth with the bus companies?

5) Will marooned inhabitants of Tennyson Lodge and Paradise Square be getting any compensation for the disruption, air pollution, traffic and noise?

6) What do the police and the bus companies think about all the other traffic problems?

7) What about local wildlife, and how many more trees are literally due for the chop?

Straight answers needed.

CS CAMPBELL
Paradise Square
Oxford