DERRICK Holt, who knows more than most about Oxford in the twentieth century, is right to say that “The building of the Westgate was responsible for the loss of much of Oxford’s history.”(Letters: September 7).

In your piece (September 2) on Rachel Barbaresi’s researches into St Ebbes, Ms Barbaresi is quoted to the effect that the story of St Ebbe’s has never been told. Not so.

In 1956 the Oxford University sociologist, JM Money, published his Family & Neighbourhood: Two Studies in Oxford, which contrasted St Ebbe’s with the then infant Barton.

Mogey and his researchers reported on how St Ebbe’s residents took pride in their homes, enjoyed strong bonds of community and identity, looked out for each other’s children, and felt very much part of Oxford, these community realities similar though to the reflections of Olive Gibbs in her 1989 memoirs (Our Olive, 1989) of growing up in neighbouring St Thomas’s.

Barton, by contrast, was at the time found to be dislocated, its new residents isolated on the outer rim of the city.

Nor should it be forgotten that Jericho was also scheduled for demolition but was spared through a successful campaign for improvement spearheaded by Councillor Gibbs.

The old Westgate Centre offered little by way of community bonds; the new might be a gleaming monument to consumerism, but as Derrick Holt laments, so much of the neighbourhoods of Oxford has been swept away in the name of Oxford’s so-called West End. To what end?

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH

Bowness Avenue, Headington