KEBLE College’s £45m scheme to redevelop the former Acland Hospital site is to face powerful opposition.

The college has submitted a planning application to create a campus between the Woodstock and Banbury roads, in what would be one of the biggest college schemes in recent history.

But Oxford Preservation Trust has today warned it will be opposing the Keble plan, which it says would result in the loss of a building of national importance.

Keble acquired the site of the former private hospital four years ago in a £10.75m deal. The new campus would provide accommodation for 250 Keble students, along with seminar rooms and a research facility.

The Keble development would have frontages on the Woodstock and Banbury roads, and would be just across the road from the £500m campus Oxford University is creating on the former Radcliffe Infirmary site.

But Debbie Dance, director of Oxford Preservation Trust, said she was “incredulous” when she saw the plans.

She said: “It is a very dense development which tries to get too much on to the site. This has led to buildings which are too high and too bulky and which will over-dominate the surrounding area.

“The suggested loss of the listed building of importance locally and nationally, with its link to the Acland family, in order to achieve a cleared site on which to develop, is not something that we support.”

She said the site occupied an important position on both the major access routes to Oxford from the north and was surrounded by listed buildings such as the Royal Oak pub, the Radcliffe Infirmary and the Radcliffe Observatory.

But she feared the designs were “distinctly horizontal in feel” and bore no relation to the character of Banbury Road and surrounding buildings both old and new.

The trust will tell planners that an important opportunity was also being missed to create a new lane linking the Banbury and Woodstock roads, through to the Radcliffe Infirmary site.

Keble bursar Roger Bolden earlier told The Oxford Times: “We think it will bring a significant improvement to Banbury Road. Keble has no wish to increase student numbers. But our aim is to be able to house 90 per cent of our students in college accommodation.”

He said the development would create a new Oxford college quad, with sunken gardens, along with a new public route for pedestrians and cyclists running along the site’s northern boundary with St Anne’s College.

Under the plan, the main Acland Hospital building would be demolished, with Felstead House, which dates from the 1860s, to be retained.

The former hospital car park on Banbury Road will become a sunken garden, overlooked by a glazed atrium. Many of the new buildings on the site will also be sunken.