Planning reforms: Oxford’s Grenoble Road is perfect example of community division
As Angela Rayner announces planning reforms designed to accelerate housebuilding and boost growth, Sky’s Paul Kelso hears opposing views in Oxford, a city struggling to meet the demands of a growing economy.
Grenoble Road is Oxford’s southern city boundary.
On one side, the Blackbird Ley’s estate, an expanding science park and Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium, which will be hosting Championship football next month.
On the other, the wheat fields and wooded hills of the Oxfordshire Green Belt, a bucolic view interrupted only by a line of pylons marching west from Didcot power station, and on which, in theory, not a brick can be laid.
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It is a perfect example of the principles that lay behind the Green Belt concept, introduced into British widespread planning practice in the 1950s.
The aim was and remains to prevent urban sprawl, ensuring cities retain practical and pleasant density, while offering the amenity of the great outdoors to those who live there.
Michael Tice wants to keep it that way.
A member of the Oxfordshire branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, he has been campaigning in retirement since 1993, but even he has had to admit defeat on Grenoble Road.
A 3,000-home development, linked to the science park that hosts the new Ellison Institute of technology, funded by billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellisson, has been given planning permission on the Green Belt land.
Michael tells me this proves that current planning law is already too permissive when it comes to protecting the countryside, and Labour’s reforms will only make that harder.
“The green belt is popular. We polled people in Oxfordshire and 80% support it, even those who live outside it,” he says.
“If you held a vote it would get twice as many votes as Labour. Current decision making means sites even as lovely as this can get released, and the argument is that the rules certainly don’t need loosening, they need tightening.”
Grenoble Road is one of three notches taken out of the Green Belt for housing in recent years as the city struggles to meet the housing demand of its expanding economy.
Burgeoning tech, life sciences and advanced manufacturing industries have joined academia, hospitals and the BMW Mini plant as reasons to work in a city where house prices are already among the highest in the country.
For those stuck on the wrong side of the property divide, affordability is more pressing than the view.
Chris Smowton jointly founded the Oxford Yimby group (Yes In My Back Yard) to give them a voice, rallying support for developments like Grenoble Road.
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Now a Liberal Democrat councillor, he is in favour of more, smarter development, in the city centre and where necessary on its edge.
The worst option he says is “green belt hopping”, where houses are only affordable in distant towns, leaving workers with a commute across the countryside to a city already straining with traffic.
“The best kind of development that we’d really love to see is densifying the inner areas of cities like Oxford.
“You’ve got inner suburbs that are two storeys tall. If we could evolve those towards being three or four storeys that would be fantastic, because they create walkable neighbourhoods.
“But when it comes to Oxford we’ve got a large housing debt, so there’s no getting round that you do have to grow out as well as up, and you want to manage that carefully and do it as close to the city as you can.”
