Sir - I recently took a trip down the B-road with foreign visitors to Oxford towards Wallingford and Nettlebed: "The England of the films", said the visitor.
The two overarching metaphors of Oxford are Garsington-Bloomsbury and the car works in Cowley: the universities, as the Dearing and other more recent reports have said, are clearly bastions of privilege.
Garsington-Bloomsbury through Eliot and Lawrence, Yeats and Huxley, and Russell and Keynes opened up arts and culture, politics and economics: the car factory opened up mobility to the public.
But the problem now is 'mass society', as Huxley saw in Brave New World, will bury itself in materialism: the rural landscape scene from the old churchyard at Garsington should not be buried under suburbia: it is one of Oxford's most precious assets. Build the houses in the Duchy of Cornwall.
Peter Galpin, Oxford
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