An old Oxfordshire guide shows not just changing landscapes but attitudes too, writes CHRIS KOENIG

A book about Oxfordshire caught my eye in a second-hand bookshop, curiously enough in Cambridgeshire, this week. It was only written 60 years ago, but already it might be describing a different place to the one we know now.

It is not so much that the countryside itself has changed - though it has with new roads, more urban sprawl, fewer trees in towns and villages - but more the way the author looks at the county.

The book is simply called Oxfordshire by Reginald Turnor. It is part of the Vision of England series published by Paul Elek and edited by Clough and Anabel Williams-Ellis. Like its more famous competitor, The Shell Guide, by John Piper (now selling, incidentally, at about £30 a copy if you are lucky) it is itself a period piece, providing an insight into changing social attitudes and aspirations since the war.

For instance, on Cowley and the car works, Mr Turnor is almost as merciless as John Betjeman - who famously referred to it as Motopolis. Turnor applauds the report of Oxford's then town planner Thomas Sharp, called Oxford Replanned, which pronounced that the "Cowley works could and should be removed to another place."

Mr Turnor wrote: "It is impossible not to applaud the suggestion, for, except to people who have become inured to Bury and Oldham, Cowley is a nightmare place. However efficient and prosperous it may be, it is, tacked on to Oxford, fundamentally wrong."

Mr Sharp seems to have been a preservationist in the old sense. He also wanted the magnificent Carfax water conduit, built in 1610, to be brought back to Oxford city centre. Amazingly, it was removed in 1787 to relieve traffic congestion and presented to Lord Harcourt of Nuneham Courtenay. He placed it in his park where it remains to this day as a sort of folly.

The irony about all this 'removing' business, is that an earlier Lord Harcourt had removed the entire village of Nuneham Courtenay to its present site because its earlier position spoiled his view.

The point here is that the sort of people who wrote travel books 60 years ago, and indeed the sort of people who read them, were largely unaware of the huge social changes taking place before their very eyes. They were not exactly snobs, more just old-fashioned aesthetes.

Driving around in a car himself (which he presumably thought should have been built in a factory somewhere else, where it wouldn't spoil his view), Mr Turnor viewed the inhabitants of the picturesque villages he visited as part of their charm.

In the village shop at Beckley, for example, he asked "the excellent woman behind a tenebrous counter" whether there was much to be seen at a nearby Roman villa. The "excellent woman" then called to her "good man" in the parlour behind the shop: "Is there anything left of the Roman villa, Amos?"

At Blenheim, which of course was built as a gift from a grateful nation to a military leader, and which in his day still had wartime Nissen huts in the Great Court, he wonders what sort of building would be appropriate for Field Marshal Montgomery, were the nation still to reward its heroes in such a way. Perhaps such a building should have been designed by his editor, Clough Williams-Ellis, who at Cornwell, near Chipping Norton, designed one of Oxfordshire's loveliest manor houses.