DERRICK Holt (Monday’s Oxford Mail ViewPoints) is quite wrong to suggest that Thomas Sharp’s proposed road north of Barton (outlined in Oxford Replanned, 1948) bore any resemblance to the so-called Barton bypass from the then Conservative Government’s Roads for Prosperity programme of the early 1990s.

The latter, had it been constructed and linked to the proposed North Oxford Tin Hat scheme, would have been a six-lane highway and part of an east-west route from Felixstowe to Fishguard, not a bypass.

It would have brought into Oxford’s northern approaches unsustainable traffic flows, while offering no relief whatsoever to the existing road system (A40, Northern Bypass, Sunderland Avenue, and beyond).

Community campaigners in Barton made it crystal clear that they did not want the estate to become a huge traffic island, with heavy industrial traffic roaring along night and day on an elevated ‘motorway’ between Barton and Oxford Crematorium, at that point only spitting distance from the Barton Neighbourhood Centre and neighbouring housing.

Yes, other campaigners were much concerned with damage to the countryside, but it was the blight to the human environment which argued most loudly against those false bypasses being built.

When Transport Secretary John MacGregor announced in March 1994 that the Oxford schemes had been withdrawn, Bartonians (and others) were much relieved, and quite rightly.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Bowness Avenue, Headington