Diverse development (From Oxford Mail)

Diverse development

10:00am Friday 10th February 2012 in Letters

CONTRARY to what your article in Wednesday’s Oxford Mail reports, the Greens are not looking to replace the whole of the current Westgate Shopping Centre with housing.

We are talking about the land behind the current shops, which is currently a no-go area of parking and roads without pavements, surrounded by residential areas.

Instead of the Labour group’s hope for a huge new multi-storey car park and a huge extension of the chain store-dominated shopping mall stretching to Oxpens Road (and hoping to bring even more traffic into Oxford along Botley and Abingdon Roads), we propose affordable housing, small business units (modelled after The Lanes in Brighton), public amenity space and a city centre community centre on this publicly-owned land.

By all means revamp the current shopping mall, this is long overdue, but be aware of the needs of Oxford’s homeless and insecurely-housed residents and of current residents of the city centre who have no public amenity space and no community centre, not just the shoppers.

SUSHILA DHALL, Chair, Oxfordshire Green Party