SO OUR self-styled community benefactors at Doric expect the people of Botley to buy their provisions, enjoy their cafés, get their eyes, nails and teeth fixed and bury their dead from a line of shipping containers in the middle of a building site.

Oxford Mail:

An artist’s impressions of plans submitted for the regeneration of Botley

This has to be the most insincere offer since the big bad wolf asked the three little pigs to come out and play. They might just as well open their ‘container city’ as a First World War ‘battlefield experience’.

Doric’s idea of research and consultation seems to go no deeper than a quick hover over a Google map and a stroll through the existing site.

So here is a message from one very concerned and long-standing resident: in Botley, we cherish our local shops, cafés and specialist services, which will surely not survive two years in a container; we cherish our local church, which we do not want to see overlooked by Doric’s monuments to greed; and we cherish our local elderly residents of Field House, whom we do not want to see herded off into the far reaches of the county. Above all, we cherish the local environment of Botley.

I have never taken part in a demonstration, despite being of the baby-boomer generation, but if this appalling plan is approved, may I book my pitch in front of the first bulldozer, please?

MARTIN ROBERTS

Stone Close

Botley Oxford