Sir, It is disappointing to see even Andy Boddington of Oxfordshire CPRE falling into the trap of referring to environmental vandalism as 'development' (Letters, October 13).

This is a term that greedy businessmen would, no doubt, want us to use and blindly believe in.

However, concreting over large swathes of open meadow (such as the one that Oxford still has at Warneford) is neither progressive, nor civilised, nor any of the other things that an advanced civilisation (and a city that would like to consider itself cultured, though one really begins to wonder) should regard as 'development'.

In that whole sector of Oxford, we are witnessing the odious sight of an academic institution that despite being of undoubted academic excellence, seems to be in the grip of a vision more appropriate to a 19th-century railway baron, one that consists of building an empire for self-aggrandizement rather than for the good of the community.

This is regressive, backward-looking, counter-developmental and deeply repugnant to anyone not impressed by megalomania.

Isaac Szobel, Steeple Aston