Sir – Spending £78m on the New Bodleian is unjustified. It has disfigured Broad Street for seven decades. Redeveloping it will perpetuate this disfigurement.

The fact that a Giles Gilbert Scott building in a prestigious site is only Grade II listed tacitly affirms its mediocrity.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner called its “undecided” neo-Georgian, neo-Jacobean, Art Deco muddle “neither one thing nor the other”. Geoffrey Tyack called it “an inert, shapeless mass”. Jan Morris’s comparison of it with “a… municipal swimming bath” insults public baths.

Cheerful 17th-century vernacular buildings were demolished to build it. Thomas Sharp lamented this brought “such… dullness as no street of this length could hope to survive”. He condemned the building’s “pseudo-monumental mass” of coursed rubblestone clashing with Oxford’s more usual ashlar masonry.

The building’s squat upper windows are ill-proportioned and jail-like. The facade over its vehicular access where 47 Broad Street once stood is dismal. The polished stone inside the corridors is drab.

Redevelopment will help but little. Removing a 1960’s penthouse from its roof will restore the skyline’s original 1940’s brutality. Opening the ground floor onto Broad Street will barely relieve its clumsiness.

The three-storey basement is an asset and should be redeveloped. However, above ground the building is an eyesore that should be demolished.

The New Bodleian should be replaced with a new public square. Central Oxford needs more open space, and here it would greatly improve the setting of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building. Slim new buildings could be added to form the square’s west and north sides.

In 2007 Dr Sarah Thomas wrongly claimed that because the building is listed “we cannot demolish it”.

Actually G.G. Scott’s Guinness brewery in Park Royal and power stations at North Tees and Rye House have already gone. For Broad Street’s sake, his New Bodleian should join them.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford