VILLAGERS have pledged to save a former award-winning pub from another bid to turn it into a house.

South Hinksey Parish Council this week agreed to oppose plans for The General Elliot, which closed in 2009, after listening to villagers.

Vale of White Horse District Council threw out a previous bid to turn it into a house in June 2010.

And parish councillors urged the district council to throw out a new bid at a village meeting on Monday.

The pub, which remains boarded up, was the last one in the village.

Parish council chairman Maggie Rawcliffe said: “We are still fighting.

“The overall feeling in the village is that the parish council should object to the application.”

She called for villagers to give their views at a further meeting at the village hall in Manor Road on March 22 at 7.30pm.

This will help create an action plan to fight the scheme.

Mrs Rawcliffe said that although South Hinksey might struggle to support a pub by itself, people from nearby villages and South Oxford would use it and make it financially viable.

She said: “We have been through the application with a fine tooth comb.

“The meeting was very well attended and it is clear that there is a strong feeling for the village to have a pub.

“It’s very important to have somewhere to meet people and get together.

“Everyone acknowledges that the village itself cannot support a pub but with the right marketing to the wider local community it would be successful. We remain strongly opposed to it being turned into a house.”

The Manor Road pub was Oxford Camra’s Pub of the Year in 2007 and 2008.

Residents even started a mock pub scheme in their own homes and the village hall to make up for the loss of their local boozer.

Pub owner the Vale Brewery Company, based at Brill, near Thame, said the pub was “not an important local community facility”.

It added that, even if it were, the “evidence submitted demonstrates that the use is no longer economically viable”.

There will be “no harm to the character of the area” as there will be no external changes, it said.

The firm needs planning permission as it has to change its official use to dwellinghouse.

  • Give your views at planning.whitehorsedc.gov.uk or Planning Services, Vale of White Horse District Council, Abbey House, Abingdon, OX14 3JE, planning reference 11/00279/COU.