Sir – It is just as well that letters to the editor aren’t the editor’s responsibility to check since almost every point in the two lead letters about Ruskin Fields on May 19 was wrong.

There is no rare wildlife on Ruskin Fields; they are not held in trust but are the private freehold property of Ruskin College; there is no covenant on them (there is a small one on another part of our land); any development would be adequately buffered from Stoke Place; and there would be no traffic access into Old Headington.

Nor do local residents ‘enjoy’ our fields, which are the private property of the college, but local folk will benefit from the enhancement of the Old Headington Conservation Area through a community project we have launched to revive our walled garden and potentially from the slowing of the traffic on the bypass if road access should come by that route.

John Ruskin would not have sided with the Nimby-ism currently being displayed. He once famously organised a band of undergraduates to help build a local road and he wrote so tellingly about education for working people that not only was our college named after him but he influenced Gandhi to want to visit us in 1931.

Neither of these great men was inspired by an imagined rural idyll but by a sense of social justice that we aim to perpetuate.

Thus we are concerned to help provide desperately-needed housing for Oxford and we believe it is possible to develop part of our fields for that purpose without detriment to the surrounding area.

Prof Audrey Mullender, Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford