Town vs Gown is perhaps a somewhat outdated concept nowadays but on Monday night, at Oxford Town Hall, it was played out in the atmospheric theatre of the council chamber.
As their predecessors peered down from portraits into the dimly-lit chamber, city councillors prepared to reconsider the decision to grant planning permission for a £29m Bodleian Library book depository in Osney Mead.
Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodley's Librarian, had flown back from the States for the crucial meeting.
She only spoke for a couple of minutes but still managed to stress how important the depository would be to the future of the Bodleian.
But her entreaty, which included an invitation to councillors to come and view copies of the Magna Carta, was not enough.
As each councillor got up to speak, it became clear that there would not be enough votes to award the scheme planning permission.
The vote was emphatic — 26 against, 15 in favour and one abstention.
Some councillors, who are members of the university, were sympathetic but considered the application on planning grounds alone, and flooding fears and the possibiliity of damaging the views of the dreaming spires were two of the main reasons for refusal.
Would the new depository make it more likely that people's houses downstream would flood?
As the rain poured down outside, councillors were not sure about the true impact of climate change over the coming years but some of them were not prepared to take the risk.
Now the Bodleian is back to square one and could appeal against the decision, and look for alternative sites.
At some point in the not too-distant future, a digital reader, dubbed the Kindle, could allow readers to download books onto a handheld computer screen, storing up to 200 volumes at a time.
Digitisation of texts may alleviate the Bodleian's task in the long-term but it is still faced with the immediate problem of finding a place to store eight million books.
Building a new bookstore would enable it to revamp the Bodleian in the city centre and make it more user-friendly for members of the public.
I'm already looking forward to that, but the Bodleian's top brains may now have to consider a book depository outside the ring road.