I gained promotion more than 50 years ago through moving to Oxford.

To a native of Blackpool, a Northerner, the culture, the buildings, the trees, the scenery of the Cotswolds and Thames-side were absolutely irresistible.

We explored a very fashionable area and found the green and spacious avenues of Headington with detached, though costly, houses again irresistible.

We mortgaged a lovely building and began our nearly 60 years of residence.

There have been many changes in our chosen, select neighbourhood since. In the next street, we've had a murder.

Two cannabis factories have been successfully raided in roads close to our house. Drug dealers operate.

Outside our front wall, we have ever-present graffiti.

When Oxford United played at the Manor, we had bus-loads of police disgorging from black Marias to control fans defecating in the next-door gardens.

My friend who lives nearby had a working brothel close to his choice home, within a stone's throw of the principal neighbourhood church.

Because of our nearness to the hospital, the John Radcliffe, all our surrounding streets were taken over by motorists anxious to obtain free parking nearby.

I'm now forced to pay scores of pounds per annum to park outside my own home.

I feel I've said enough to record our ever-increasing dissatisfaction.

So I won't mention street squalor, the neglect of property by students in multiple occupation, poor bus services, the proliferation of overflowing and unsightly litter bins, pavements apparently maintained as testing mountain tracks, London Road traffic chaos and, finally, the engorgement of the whole of my once-select neighbourhood by the John Radcliffe and the Brookes University campus.

Lionel Horner Eden Drive Headington Oxford