Reading that Christopher Le Brun intended to “fill to the brim” the Summer Exhibition (until August 15), my first thought was: “What’s new in that?”

How can the show’s ever crowded spaces get any fuller? Yet sculptor and painter Le Brun RA and fellow Royal Academicians seem to have pulled off some sort of magic trick. With a traditional ‘salon hang’ in the grandest space and a rethink in the other galleries, they have fitted in almost the same number of works as before yet somehow made the galleries feel more spacious. From over 11,000 entries, 1,117 pieces are on show. Prints have an extra room, 312 of them hung by Christopher Orr RA who is “passionate about seeing that printmaking is seen equally with other works here”. The Large and Small Weston Rooms are also far less crowded. And with photography in the opening room, Le Brun makes a strong statement about photography as an art form. Oxfordshire is well represented. Ten artists, 12 pieces, chiefly in the Small Weston Room and Gallery I: woodcuts from Juliet Bankes, Banbury, and Sue Cave, Little Tew; a small pencil and watercolour from Jane Dowling, Charlton-on-Otmoor; a hand-coloured etching by Mick Rooney RA, Charlbury; and a screenprint by Hen Coleman, Henley on Thames. And from Oxford: Deborah Laidlaw (two oil paintings, View from My Window, and a still life); Peter Lawrence’s Five for England (Wallace and Gromit, Punch, and cricketers included); Muriel Mallows (two oils, a beach scene, gulls fluttering up in the wind, and a still life); and Joseph Winkelman’s tiny etching of St Paul’s. Watlington’s James Kelso’s acrylic, Dune, is in Gallery VII. There are some beautiful works in the book cabinets in Gallery I. Among them Juliet Bankes’s A Village Spinney Remembered, an imaginative concertinaed woodcut book of muted blues and greys showing a mass of telegraph wires, roofs and other urban delights. The area’s road signs mourn a changed environment: Ash Street, Beech Way and so on, the trees few even so. I was reluctant to leave the Lecture Room once I got to it. Curated by Michael Craig-Martin RA, it was full of signature pieces by RAs invited by him. There was a brilliant, compelling piece by Anish Kapoor, for example, a trail of white clay handprints uncoiling like a spring from Richard Long, an Antony Gormley wire sculpture, a Le Brun oil, a Tony Cragg rock-stack-like bronze, and suspended in the middle of the room, gently swaying as people walked by, a long row of flattened silver tableware: Endless Sugar by Cornelia Parker. Here too was a fun model of a bus teetering on the brink of not a cliff exactly, but the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion for some reason. This was Richard Wilson’s, and called: Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea.