12 October 2007

Campaign Manager Andy Boddington explains the idea behind the Grid Grid:

“I think that the real problem we now face in Oxfordshire is that the planning system recognises that we have centuries of past but does not look forward to centuries of future. Our planning system is designed to fix short-term problems. We need to look beyond the next 20 years, perhaps beyond the next 50 to a century ahead.
What sort of city will we have then? We can guess that the historic environment will be protected but the green spaces are being threatened year on year.
CPRE is calling for a Green Grid for Oxford. It will link up the green spaces that matter for people and wildlife. Some of those spaces are there now. Others need to be created. Not next year. Perhaps not in ten years. A vibrant green grid will take decades to create. This is CPRE’s challenge. Do the residents, politicians and planners have a long-term vision, or are they only interested in short-term fixes?”

Click for larger image

The Green Grid

One of the striking deficiencies in the draft Core Strategy for Oxford is the way that it treats green space. Meadows, sports grounds and nature reserves are looked at in isolation, and more often than not eyeballed for their development potential. Planners and sometimes campaigners fall into the trap of viewing green space as a list of sites rather than a network of interlinked spaces for the benefit of people and wildlife. There is another consequence of this approach—the Green Belt is seen as something outside the city rather than integral to its green fabric. Many people do not even realise that 52% of the city is open space and 27% of Oxford is in the Green Belt.

With both the Green Belt and green spaces within the city at their most threatened for decades, it is time to think more strategically. That is why we should create a Green Grid for Oxford.

CPRE proposes that the City Council, in collaboration with neighbouring Districts, establishes a Green Grid across the city and into the neighbouring green belt. The Green Grid will enable green spaces within the city, whatever their use, and those around the city to be viewed in an integrated way. The Green Grid will:

• encourage linkage of green spaces
• promote people and wildlife routes into, within and across the city's landscape
• seek to "green the green belt" close to the city by developing nature reserves, community woodlands and recreational use
• have an emphasis on community involvement and management.

The Oxford Green Grid will be a long term project and it will take vision and determination to develop it, as well as extensive negotiations with landowners and tenants. A green corridor that linked the Ley Valley to Headington Quarry and Shotover, for example, might not be achieved in 50 years. But as housing, retail and industry is renewed in the second half of this century, essential green spaces could be opened up—if the vision is there. This will require a commitment as strong and far-sighted as that of city councillors in the mid-1950s, when they set out to create a green belt around Oxford. Do we live in an age of vision, or is the relentless attrition of green spaces the measure of our age?

The map above is a conceptual sketch of the main axes of the Oxford Green Grid. The ecologically rich Cherwell and Thames Meadows form north-south spines that link the Hamptons, Wytham and Pinkhill to Radley. Having talked to many residents of East Oxford in recent months, I know there will be strong support for the East Oxford Arc, linking Christchurch meadows to Warneford Meadow and the Thames, and embracing the threatened Warneford Meadow and Southfield Golf Course. These are just the main axes, there are many greenways and threads that can be created over the next century.

The green spaces that surround the City are as important as those within. The Cinctured Hills of Oxford in the conceptual grid owe their name to CPRE Oxfordshire's founding chairman, John Buchan:

No one can understand Oxford unless he knows the Oxford countryside. Half her beauty lies in her setting. Cambridge, which has many special lovelinesses, is a city of the plains, and over what she calls her hills one is apt to walk without noticing them. But Oxford has a cincture of green uplands and a multitude of little valleys. It is only from her adjacent heights that her charms can be compromised into one picture and the true background found to her towers (Memory Hold the Door 1940).

Do we have the vision to create a green grid, or are the sports fields, meadows, valleys and cinctured hills of Oxford to be eroded in a piecemeal fashion?

Further Information

• Radio Oxford. Andy Boddington talks to Bill Heine about the Green Grid (12 October)
• Oxford Times Leader. CPRE's Green Grid (12 October)
• Oxford Times. Green grid 'to protect city' (12 October)
• Oxford Mail. Oxford needs 'Green Grid' says CPRE (12 October)
• Oxford Times. Bruce Tremayne writes on the Green Grid (26 October)
• South of Grenoble Road
• Oxford's Green Spaces under threat
• The Green Belt