SIR,—The Vice-Chancellor's opponents are, 1 suppose, free to regard personal
abuse as a legitimate weapon in the campaign they are waging against him if they choose to do so. But they must not be allowed to get away with the assertion that the proposal to close Mag- dalen Bridge to through traffic is simply an attempt to 're-medimvalise High Street' and to restore 'the calm serenity of a vanished era.' When Rotterdam was redesigned after the war the architects planned a shopping area closed to through motor traffic not because they were medimvalist cranks but for the greater con- venience of those who used the city's centre. Oxford's good fortune is still to have the opportunity, without destruction on anything like the scale which will be inevitable in most great cities, to provide something that every city will be driven, before long, to try some- how to secure.
To do this does not (in my view at least) involve the driving of a road through Christ Church Meadow. It does, however, involve recognition of the fact that the most economic route for traffic is not the shortest, but the quickest, route.—Yours faithfully,
Lincoln College, Oxford
WALTER OAKESHOTV
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