I would choose- An embryo that will not close- (The incomplete attempt)
(Unfertilized emotion) (Half dead thing)
I would choose-
A single breathing word Stuck in the back of your throat
Struggling itself to life Some-thing from no-thing
I would choose-
above-
The metallic baby Slides clean and bloodless Out of an artificial womb.
Its cries are only the recordings of cries. Trimmed of all the anomalies of humanity. Its first words are only pretty repetitions. The perfected utterance of a dead universe.
The sedation of skin that never bleeds. The ease of the baby that never cries. What does it know of poetry? What does it know of life?
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A two-bed, one-bath home in Cowley is currently listed for £450,000. In 1998, it sold for just £85,150.
While wages have also grown over that time period, they haven’t grown nearly fast enough to keep up with rising housing costs. Across England, housing prices have more than doubled relative to wages since the 90s. In 1997, the median home cost about three or four years of median wages. Now, the median home in Oxfordshire sells for over ten years of wages, and in London it’s nearly 13.
The decline of homeownership
Across the country, rates of homeownership have declined, especially for young people. The homes people are left in are smaller: smaller than they were in the past, smaller than homes elsewhere in Europe, and a lot smaller than homes in other English-speaking countries. The average home in Britain is smaller than the average in New York, America’s most crowded city.
That house in Cowley, which costs over five times as much in nominal terms today as it did in 1998? In both years, it was an average-priced house in Oxford.
Why has home ownership become so much more unattainable in the UK? It’s no great mystery. Across the political spectrum, there is a broad consensus: for decades, Britain has not built enough housing.
In 2004, a government report found that England needed 270,000 new homes per year to keep up with demand. Every year – under Labour, the Coalition, and the Conservatives – the real number would fall short of that – sometimes far short. Every year, outside the pandemic and 2007-2009 financial crisis, housing prices rocketed ever upwards.
Finally, in 2022, the government didn’t fall short of its target! Unfortunately, that was only because Rishi Sunak scrapped the government’s target of 300,000 homes per year after years of Conservative conflictedness about it.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto promised 1.5 million new homes in England over the next parliament. The Conservatives one-upped them by promising 1.6 million (but only in the “right places”, like cities). Now, the Labour government has revamped the housing targets for local areas. It says the targets will be mandatory for councils, which are required to approve major development projects.
But it is still to be seen whether they have the political will to give teeth to this “mandate” – and how much of a dent it could put in a housing crisis that is 40 years in the making.
Oxford prices “excruciatingly high”
Over the last decade, rents in Oxford have been consistently higher than in the rest of the country, and is the most expensive city to rent in outside London.
Even for students seeking a shared house, it can be pricey. A survey conducted by Oxford Brookes’ Hybrid Magazine found that most students there were paying at least £800 per month for rent (£9600 per year).
Omer Mihović is an undergraduate studying Biochemistry. As a second-year at St. Edmund Hall, he does not receive college accommodation. Mihović is satisfied with the Cowley house he lives in with five housemates; his only complaint is the price.
Mihović told Cherwell: “As a foreign student, I generally find these rent prices excruciatingly high. But as far as I’m aware, the rents in Oxford are also considered a bit above average compared to pretty much everyone in the UK as well.”
Oxford City Council set an ambitious plan for local housing construction in its Oxford Local 2040 Plan. But the Planning Inspectorate rejected the plan for proposing too much housing – it relied on Oxfordshire’s rural councils to do much of the building in their own districts.
Oxford City Council notes what anyone who has walked across town might realise: except for the floodplains, the city itself is pretty filled up. Short of putting a subdivision on Christ Church Meadow or a skyscraper on a college quad, where is new housing supposed to go?
Choking off development
In many parts of the world, the answer would be obvious: sprawl outward. If there is demand to live in the city, it should just get larger. But Oxford’s growth has been intentionally choked by the green belt which surrounds the city – and takes up ten times more land than the built up parts of the city itself. Before the green belt came into effect in 1975, Oxford could grow as more people wanted to move in. But since 1975, the city limits have remained almost exactly the same.
The green belt is a popular idea, and it has succeeded at preserving the rural character of the surrounding countryside. But despite the ‘green’ in the name, much of the land is not particularly natural, and green belts can cause as much environmental harm as they prevent. With many Oxford workers priced out of the city, they have to move beyond the green belt and often commute by driving long distances across it. While many commute from Oxfordshire towns on the other side of the green belt like Didcot and Bicester, others commute from as far as Bournemouth. At times, Oxfordshire councils haveoffered to move residents to Birmingham and Cardiff due to lack of affordable housing here.
Even on vacant parcels of land inside the green belt, development is incredibly difficult. Local residents have been organising for four years against a plan to build 32 homes in Iffley, arguing that it would damage the rural character of the area and harm one family of badgers.
Even once the council approves a development, it’s not smooth sailing. A mixed-use development near Thornhill was approved by Oxford City Council in 2022, with every member voting in favour, but it still wasn’t signed off on until October 2024.
Local residents often object to new housing development in their area for a variety of reasons, sometimes getting labelled as ‘NIMBYs’ (for Not In My BackYard). New development can increase noise and traffic, potentially decrease the property values of existing property owners, and lead to change that residents just don’t want to see in their area.
But when every local council can veto new development which benefits the country as a whole despite imposing some local costs, housing doesn’t go anywhere. And the British planning system gives local residents some of the most power in the world to veto it.
The world’s strictest planning system?
In London, extraordinarily high prices are driven both by planning constraints and a lack of new land to develop in the city centre. There, so little land is open for redevelopment that Nazi bombing raids actually helped long-term economic growth – though this is partially due to historic preservation laws that prevent redevelopment. But in the rest of Southern England, where land is more plentiful, it is entirely planning constraints, and not a lack of land, driving up prices.
Peter Kemp, a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, studies housing policy.
Kemp told Cherwell: “The house building targets now are being seriously thought about, and the government has talked about what it can do as part of its growth agenda. But the problem is planning in this country. In Britain, we have one of – if not the – most strict planning systems in the advanced economies.”
Unlike countries with by-right development and zoning – where housing development does not require approval in areas zoned as residential – councils in the UK individually scrutinise and can vote down every major development. This can lead to years of delays in planning. In both Oxford and England as a whole, about 30% of planning applications for housing were rejected from June 2023 to June 2024.
But Kemp also sees other challenges for the targets, including a strong “NIMBY lobby”, a shrinking and ageing construction workforce, and lack of funds for building social housing. Kemp says that while private developers are building about as much housing today as they were in the 70s, construction by local authorities has fallen dramatically.
Kemp continued: “If we really want to get anywhere near the level of housebuilding that the government wishes us to get to, we will need an expansion of building of social housing, particularly by local authorities.”
Even if England’s building targets are met for one year, or over the course of this parliament, it’s not clear that housing would become much more affordable anytime soon. In recent years, Oxfordshire has been fairly close to meeting the new targets set out by the government (Figure 3). Still, it is tens of thousands of units short of where it would be had it met its targets throughout the century.
Kemp told Cherwell: “If you’ve got a shortage that’s taken 40 years to build up, it’s going to take you many decades to solve that problem, and only if you’re determined and keep going through whoever is in power.”
Wider problems
The same local veto points and anti-development attitudes that have strangled housing construction have also hounded just about every construction project in the UK.
HS2, which is proposed to run 134 miles between London and Birmingham, has been under planning or construction since 2010. Over the same time period, China has built24,000 miles of high-speed rail. You can travel between major cities in Italy, Spain, and France on high-speed rail. Meanwhile, HS2 is working through its 8,276 separate consents and spending £100 million on a structure that may or may not help to protect bats.
If you want to get to Cambridge, your best bet currently is to take an expensive train to London, or to hack the local bus routes by making a stop in Bedford. East West Rail plans to re-establish a direct connection between the university cities, but there is no set date for the line’s completion, and it is currently being held up because of worries about… bats and water voles.
Britain’s reservoirs are drying up as demand for water increases, but a new one hasn’t been built since 1991. Local opposition has rallied against a proposed reservoir in Abingdon even while demanding that something be done to protect the water supply (something else, that is). Winter fuel payments and the cost of electricity have been a major political hot potato. But under the Conservative governments, wind farms were effectively blocked if there was any local opposition at all, and solar farms were banned from most agricultural land.
Add this all up, and Britain’s sclerotic approach to building explains much of the cost-of-living crisis. Without being able to build a functional rail network, it can be cheaper for friends to meet in Spain than buy a train ticket from Newcastle to Birmingham. Without building housing, prices go up. Without building renewable energy sources, energy prices hit record highs.
Britain must pick a path on building
Dear reader, I have a confession to make. Despite having a strange interest in British planning policy, I am actually American. I’m just a wonkish Anglophile who happens to be a visiting student for one year in this fine country.
When I return to the University of North Carolina next year, it will be in an area that has made very different decisions about these matters than the UK has. The ‘Research Triangle’ area of North Carolina has nearly 2.5 million people today, up from just 700,000 in the mid-70s. Where there were tobacco fields just a few decades ago, one can now drive through 50 straight miles of low-density suburbs. This growth has been driven by tech jobs, the region’s universities, and the largest science park in the US.
Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire could have followed this path – and in some ways it’s an enviable one. I will love paying much lower rent for a much larger house next year! But it would be a travesty to see all of England’s green and pleasant land paved over with American-style subdivisions.
Thankfully, that is not the only option. Oxford’s green belt is ten times larger than the developed parts of the city, and is itself surrounded by more protected land in the Cotswolds and Chilterns. With high-density development, even a small chunk of underutilised green belt land could go a long way towards alleviating the housing crisis and improving people’s quality of life.
God will not descend from the clouds to announce the objectively correct way to measure the value of badger families and rural preservation against housing sizes and economic growth. If the British people want to prioritise other values over affordable housing, faster trains, and a more prosperous society, they are free to do so. But Britain should be clear-eyed about those tradeoffs. In an era of stagnant real wages, rising homelessness, and eye-watering housing costs, it is right to wonder how much of the status quo is worth preserving.
Cherwell’s Film Section Editors decided to get together and review their favourite releases of 2024. Ranging from animation to drama, these are the Editors’ picks for the must-see pictures of the past year. If you haven’t watched these yet, there are no longer excuses!
Review: Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams (Dan Paling)
Pablo Berger’s heartfelt animation, Robot Dreams, based on Sarah Varon’s 2007 graphic novel, reached UK screens in March 2024. The protagonist, a lonely dog-stroke-human (he walks upright and watches cable television) orders a life-size robot online. The machine companion — conveniently named ‘Robot’ — arrives at Dog’s door. Dog assembles him; AI-canine friendship blossoms.
Gallivanting around ‘80s Manhattan, the unlikely pair are captured charmingly by Berger’s warm colours and soft curves. The animation is melancholic, yet endearing. There’s something of vintage Hanna-Barbera.
Robot Dreams is the kind of universal cinema that enchants all ages. Dog represents none of us (he’s a dog!). But he’s also everyone: longing for connection, joyful in friendship. These tropes are never diminished as childish, nor rendered ‘too adult’ for youngsters to understand. This is a platonic love story of the most serious character.
Disaster strikes when Dog organises a trip to the seaside and Robot is incapacitated by rust after a swim (he’s made of metal, of course). The two lose sight of each other, the beach closes for the season and our protagonists embark on separate lives, flooded by mourning. The film changes gear. Now it’s about isolation, powerlessness, moving on.
Robot Dreams shows that animation can take on the biggest themes. Therein lies its brilliance. It’s that rare combination of humble and grandiose. All that, and its unforgettable title track (Earth, Wind & Fire’s classic anthem ‘September’), make it difficult to remain unmoved by Berger’s portrait of love and loss.
Review: Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour (Lara Machado)
In September 2024, Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes returned to the big screen with his 7th feature film Grand Tour. As a long-term fan of his work, I may be biased but can assure you that it did not disappoint.
The film follows Edward, a British Diplomat working in 1917 Burma, now Myanmar. Overcome by fear when faced with the prospect of being reunited with his long-term, long-distance fiancée Molly, Edward decides to run away from her. Molly, however, is determined to marry Edward and it soon turns into a chase across the Asian continent.
Genre-bending as usual, Gomes mixes modern day documentary footage – captured by three different directors of photography – with the film’s narrative, drawing attention to the artificial nature of what we are watching, all while reminding us of the magic that is cinema. To add to the irreality of it all, modern day items and pieces of the set are sometimes introduced into Edward and Molly’s story and, despite the characters being British, all the actors are Portuguese and speak in their native language. None of the dialogue in the many languages belonging to the countries included in the tour is translated. The characters don’t understand so neither do we. Gomes once said that all his films were bizarre, Portuguese remakes of The Wizard of Oz. So, if you are looking for something to make you believe in the magic of cinema again, I cannot recommend Grand Tour more.
Reporting by Euan Elliott, Selina Chen, Ila Banerji, Laurence Cooke, Seb Page, Conor Walsh, Charlie Bailey, Bryn Mollet, Georgia Campbell, and Peter Chen.
This story includes chronological updates.
Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) have established an occupation of the Radcliffe Camera Library, after disbanding their encampment in July of this year. Protesters threw books out of the window, in order to use them as weights to hold down flags. Fire and Rescue as well as police have arrived, approaching the dome with bolt cutters.
Unlike last term, when tents were set up around the library, an occupation of the library itself is currently taking place. OA4P have dubbed this new occupation “Khalida Jarrar Library” after a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an organisation designated a “terrorist organisation” by the US and the European Union, but not by the UK.
At 9am this morning, a group of people entered the Rad Cam in masks and gave people one minute to leave. Shortly afterwards, security arrived, preventing access to the library from the main entrance as well as from the entrance via the Gladstone Link.
A protester with a megaphone, who was standing on a ledge of the library told onlookers that this action was “made necessary after the university ceased contact with OA4P”, demanding a “complete divestment from all Israeli interests and an overhaul of the ethical investment policy.”
This comes after the university threatened legal action in the form of a court order last term, shortly before OA4P disbanded their encampment. When Cherwell asked OA4P about the court order, they claimed that the eviction notice only stated “you must not return to the land for purposes of an encampment.”
An official spokesperson told Cherwell that the occupation will only end “when the University publicly agrees to meet all six of OA4P’s demands within a defined timeframe.”
In an official statement: OA4P said “As Palestinians in Gaza are finally allowed a moment to breathe, grieve, return, and begin rebuilding their homes, mosques, churches, schools, and hospitals, our efforts must be redoubled. It is imperative to continue pressuring and disrupting the systems and powers that sustain the zionist project. To take our eyes off of Gaza now would be an abdication of our responsibility to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
Updates at 1:45pm:
Following discussion between members of OA4P inside the library, police and staff entered the building. The police then surrounded the building, blocking the entrance to the Rad Cam.
A small number of protesters from a rally that was meant to be taking place on Cornmarket street arrived outside the Rad Cam and began to chant.
The protesters by the Rad Cam window announced through a loudspeaker that it was no longer a University matter, but a police matter, and that the police had made it clear they were going to begin arresting people in due course.
Several police officers with specialised climbing equipment have entered, and some have been stationed on the roof.
A University spokesperson told Cherwell: “We thoroughly condemn the disruption and distress caused to members of the University by the actions of these individuals. While the University supports the right to peaceful protest, this action plainly goes beyond the bounds of acceptable protest and is a clear risk to the safety of protesters, students, staff and members of the public. It is preventing students from using the resources and space of the library to pursue their education. It is also putting at risk on a historic building and its contents. The protesters are in breach of University regulations and policies and we will be enforcing the University’s disciplinary policies.”
Updates at 2:45pm:
Multiple police officers with specialised climbing equipment have entered, and some are stationed on the roof. One officer entered carrying a stretcher.
A student told Cherwell that the police brought a person into a van and, despite protesters’ attempts to block the van, it left via New College Lane.
An OA4P spokesperson told Cherwell that “arrests have been made and actionists taken away in vans, but not all of the actionists.”
Five hours after their initial appearance, a group of protesters remain huddled outside on the ledge of a Rad Cam window.
Updates at 4pm:
An officer abseiled from the roof down to the ledge, where three protesters remained. Another officer exited the window and put a restraining jacket on one of the protesters.
The officer then clipped the protester onto the same abseiling gear, and together, the two abseiled down and reached the ground. The protesters raised their gloved fists throughout their arrest.
On the ground, a physical confrontation took place between the protesters and the police as the police tried to prevent them from blocking vans from leaving. Police and protesters pushed one another, with protesters falling to the ground.
Updates at 4:45pm:
The Fire Brigades Union General Secretary Steve Wright released a statement on X saying: “Firefighting is a humanitarian profession, completely independent of law enforcement (…) and does not include assisting the police response to protests or the removal of protestors”
“The Fire Brigades Union advises all firefighters to refuse to participate in law enforcement activities alongside the police. We have a long history of supporting the right to protest, as well as peace and justice for Palestine.”
Updates at 5:30pm:
Around 5pm, the final protesters were carried to Broad Street by the police and taken away in vans. In total, all 13 protestors who had taken part in the occupation were arrested.
Updates on 27th January:
Of the 13 protestors arrested, only one was a current student. The University has said that they will be subject to the disciplinary processes in place.
In a message to students, the university said while it “supports the right to peaceful protest, this action was disruptive and dangerous. It presented a clear risk to the safety of protestors, students, staff and members of the public.
“We remain committed to ensuring that Oxford is a welcoming and inclusive place, and one in which we express ourselves through robust, civil debate.”
Magdalen College’s proposal to redevelop its Waynflete site student accommodation, situated beside the Cowley roundabout on St Clement’s Street, has received complaints from local residents in a recent public consultation, despite initial changes to the proposal to appease residents.
The reconstruction would replace the current Waynflete building, constructed in the 1960s, and see 76 new student accommodation rooms being built. Magdalen describes the project as aiming to deliver a “high quality, truly sustainable student accommodation development.”
The college amended their original proposal to overcome initial objections from residents, shortly after planning was first submitted in June 2024. Since then, a letter submitted by the York Palace Residents Association as part of the consultation said that the building “would replace a poorly designed building with another which in no way respects the historic character of the locality” and that they are “deeply disappointed by the lack of contact from the applicant”.
The main concern of residents seems to be the potential impact on their ability to light their properties and gardens and the removal of a Beech tree. Their first objection was that the college provided the wrong ownership certificate (a technical mistake) and requested the planning office to invalidate the project and start again. The residents also state that “the existing building is a blight to the historical significance of the area.”
The Bursar at Magdalen College, told Cherwell that: “The College has undertaken an extensive engagement strategy from the beginning of the project, and we have consulted with neighbouring residents and community stakeholders in addition to local and national authorities and consultees. We are excited at the prospect of this development. The new building will develop a sense of community, greatly enhance the quality of student accommodation and deliver significant public benefits.”
Conservation groups have largely approved of the project. A letter from the Georgian Group, a charity promoting the maintenance of Georgian buildings in England and Wales, said that “the proposed new buildings respond to this sensitive site much more thoughtfully than the existing structures.” The proposal has also been supported by St Hilda’s College and Magdalen College School, a nearby private school.
Construction of the original Waynflete building coincided with Magdalen’s 400th anniversary in 1958, and was completed in 1963. From day one the accommodation block was considered a local eyesore, with Oxford alumni and renowned poet Sir John Betjeman reflecting that: “a block has arisen by my own old College, Magdalen. It is really terrible. I don’t know what it is; it is not quite modern, it is not quite old, and it is not in scale with anything … But there it is.”
Professor James Binney, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics, has been awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal for his work researching the structure and evolution of galaxies. Previous recipients of the award include Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Edwin Hubble.
Professor Binney completed his D.Phil. at Christ Church, Oxford and has held a postdoctoral position at the University since 1981, where he was a lecturer, fellow, and tutor at Merton College. He has previously been awarded the Maxwell Prize of the Institute of Physics and the Isaac Newton medal.
His influential work focuses on early galaxy formation and his research on the importance of cooling gas in forming dark matter halos, which determine the structure of different galaxies, is an integral part in galaxy formation models. Binney’s research has also shed light on black holes, star formation, and the chemical evolution of galaxies.
He calls our galaxy: “the complicated beast”. Having contributed significantly to producing the standard model for the mass distribution of the Milky Way, he is now working with data from the Gaia observatory to revise this model using the theoretical methods he himself helped develop.
Several textbooks written by Binney are now considered a standard work of reference and are widely used in the field. He has authored over 200 articles and served on many funding bodies both within the UK and overseas. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest and most influential scientific institutions.
Binney said: “I am delighted to be honoured by the RAS by the award of this year’s Gold Medal. It was my great good fortune to be a theorist at a time of extraordinary progress in astronomy, mostly driven by spectacular advances in instrumentation.
“Most of what I’ve achieved has been in collaboration with generations of brilliant students and postdocs – this honour must be shared with them.”Previously, Binney has said “it’s a miracle that and a mystery that the material world can be described mathematically” and that “learning physics changes and enriches your outlook on anything.”
The government has recently announced the bringing into force of the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act (HEFSA), after the act’s introduction was suspended by the Labour government in July 2024. The revised legislation has removed provisions allowing individuals to sue universities directly and has exempted student unions from the duty to uphold and promote freedom of speech and academic expression.
The Freedom of Speech Act grants the Higher Education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), the power to investigate breaches of free speech and issue fines for non–compliance. Under the act, universities must also publish and uphold a code of practice for promoting free speech on campus.
Oxford University’s published code of practice on free speech, developed in response to HEFSA in 2024, states that the legislation “does not change the university’s pre-existing position that freedom of speech and academic freedom are central tenets of university life.” It also specifies that commitment to free speech exists with “appropriate regulations on the time, place, and manner of events”.
In response to the reintroduction of the legislation, an Oxford University spokesperson told Cherwell that the code of practice “will be reviewed and updated as appropriate in light of further information from the Government about planned changes to the legislation.”
Student protests and demonstrations are also subject to regulations as outlined in the code. Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P), has criticised the code, telling Cherwell that it “does not trust the University of Oxford or the OfS to dutifully protect the right to student protest.”
Brasenose College’s last minute announcement of a talk by former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy, sparked a protest of students who blocked the entrance of the college. Under HEFSA, such speakers would gain stronger legal protection against being “no-platformed,” and the University would be obligated to uphold their right to share their views, regardless of how contentious they may be.
HEFSA has divided opinion within Oxford’s academic community. Among its supporters are over 60 Oxford academics, part of a larger group of over 500 signatories to an open letter urging the government to reinstate the legislation. The letter denies that the act would threaten the safety of minority groups and emphasises its importance in safeguarding intellectual diversity.
Opponents of the act warn that it may shield hate speech under the guise of free expression, with antisemitism being raised as a key concern, as some claim the act could open the door for Holocaust deniers in universities. The government insists that the revisions made to the act protect minority groups and the Union of Jewish Students has welcomed them.
In response to the proposed legislation, one student told Cherwell: “I think there’s been a change in attitudes at universities recently in favour of more free debate, so it’s a tentative step in the right direction.”
Keble College’s Governing Body has informed students that it will not host a ball in 2025 after a student-run committee submitted two separate and complete ball proposals. An “informal” go-ahead was given to the drawing-up of a second proposal, which was a collaborative ball with St Catherine’s College, and was vetoed before being presented to the Governing Body, which usually confirms such proposals.
Last year, Keble interviewed and selected a committee to create a proposal for a ball in Trinity 2025. Over 15 students helped draft a proposal that included arrangements for food, security, and entertainment providers over the long vacation. However, when the proposal was sent to the college’s Governing Body in Michaelmas for final approval, it was rejected.
In an email announcing the rejected ball proposal, the JCR President cited the recent appointment of a new bursar as the main complication: “While the Ball Committee handles most of the work to put on a Ball, there’s a certain amount of unavoidable extra strain that it puts on College staff, particularly the bursar who is ultimately liable for ensuring events like this run smoothly.”
In an effort to overcome the difficulties a ball would place on the college in this situation, the Keble Ball President proposed a collaboration with St Catherine’s College in late Michaelmas, who are currently without a location for their summer ball due to construction work. This idea was taken to both colleges and they were given an “informal yes” to create a joint ball proposal.
Over the winter vacation, another committee of over 30 members was formed and a ball proposal was written up for a joint Keble–Catz Ball. The proposal included plans for Keble to host the ball with St Catherine’s to take legal and financial liability, and the colleges employed lawyers to draft contracts to ensure the viability of the plan.
Before the final ball proposal was taken to the Keble Governing Body meeting last week, committee members received an email from the Ball Presidents explaining that the proposal never made it to the Governing Body, “citing issues with college administration as the key deciding factor in their decision.” The email went on to say that “these are the unfortunate realities of dealing with instability in the college administrative system.”
Following repeated reports of anti-social behaviour, Hertford and Exeter colleges have submitted a planning proposal to Oxford City Council to revamp their sports grounds.
In the planning application to Oxford City Council the colleges propose to build, “new sports facilities including a light weight canopy and enclosure housing padel tennis courts, outdoor padel courts, cricket nets and the creation of a new basketball and netball hard surface court.”
The colleges plan to repurpose “Exeter squash courts for use as a golf simulator and the change of use of Hertford squash courts to café, changing facilities, sports hub reception area and community facilities.”
In their planning statement, the colleges described how, “the site has struggled over time with instances of anti-social behaviour and vandalism. This issue has been the main driver of these proposals.” The statement also detailed that, from November 2021 to November 2024, the most common crime reported on this site and in its immediate surroundings were violent or sexual offences, with 31 incidents. The second most reported was anti-social behaviour, with 26 incidents.
Local resident Elaine Welsh told Cherwell: “It’s not very nice to walk past badly damaged and treated pavilions. I think the local teenagers who I have seen hanging out there need something more constructive to do.
“I think they’ve got nowhere else to go where they can hang out with their friends and if we had more youth workers to work with them to create something that they wanted we might see a reduction in the anti-social behaviour. They need to be part of local facilities so that they feel that they have an investment in it rather than feeling so alienated from it that they actually destroy it.”
In Hertford and Exeter College’s planning statement, the colleges wrote that “the new sports pitches and sensitive lighting at the site will address historic issues of anti-social behaviour and vandalism which is known to the applicants and neighbours as a long-standing issue which has resulted in the underuse of this site.” They added that the project aimed to create “a vibrant, year-round sporting ‘hub’ for use by both residents and students.”
