STEADY on. Regeneration rhetoric around what looks like a vast Botley retail park posing as the ‘western gateway to Oxford’ needs careful consideration (February 14 and 15). People live here. Certainly our shopping precinct needs a facelift, our library is too small and our community hall has a dodgy roof – and we have been saying this for years.

But does the price of fixing these things really have to involve ‘flattening’ all of them, plus popular local shops, the Baptist church and a large block of sheltered flats for which no replacement has yet been mentioned? Botley may be outside the city boundary but like Cowley, Headington, Littlemore or Summertown, it is a living community, not a house of cards to be knocked down and built up as best suits developer profits.

We have been asked what we want in the past and it is not what we appear to be getting.

Next week’s consultation must be a genuine one. The large stores along Botley Road were probably called a regenerating western gateway when they were built.

Let’s not allow the same mistakes to happen with Botley itself. And let’s make sure that the needs of residents and the users of the churches, the library and the community hall are at the heart of the planning. There is much more to life than shopping.

JANET GODDEN County Cllr, North Hinksey and Wytham Division