Sir – With regard to your article (Shopping till you drop, January 20) by Chris Koenig, it was good to read that the plan to build the £22m shopping centre fell through.
What a ghastly frontage it would have vandalised St Aldate’s with, between the Victorian-style St Aldate’s Tavern and the more pleasing stone buildings, than the one planned on its other side. Anything remind you of the McDonald’s building in Cornmarket Street?
Yes, perhaps we do need more choice of shops in Oxford selling new goods that we have perhaps not seen in our existing many shops (although one would question more and more shops with so many boarded-up we pass by — George Street a good example).
Gordon Reid, centre manager, has not got it quite right when he says: “The world has moved on from the objections of academics to the objections of the ghastly Woolworth’s building that went up in place of the more ‘pleasing to the eye’ Clarendon Hotel building.”
The world has come round again, Mr Reid, to wanting buildings that blend in with our beautiful architecturally-pleasing city. And not buildings looking all the same, such as you get in Swindon, Milton Keynes, etc.
The competition today is not ‘more of the same’ but more ‘interestingly different’.
Peter Berry, Oxford
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