Issue 66 — June, 2009
Jericho to be a conservation area
Cranham street, showing the distinctive Gothic windows. Paul Hornby reports on moves to protect a unique district
It comes as a surprise to visitors that Jericho is not a conservation area. It has a distinct character worthy of protection and is surrounded on three sides by existing conservation areas. The Jericho Community Association and the Jericho Living Heritage Trust, with the support of the Civic Society and the Oxford Preservation Trust, and many notable individuals, have campaigned over the years for Jericho to be designated as a conservation area.
On 20 May the City Executive Board discussed a recommendation from the Planning Manager that a Jericho conservation area be implemented ‘when resources permit’. This amounted to a rather meaningless and indefinite commitment. In the event, the Board came to a more positive conclusion – agreeing to commence work this year, if resources allow, and make a bid for funding for next year in the Council’s budget.
The Planning Manager estimates the cost at £40,000. This is considered excessive, and many people are convinced that the cost could be substantially lower.
The objective is to protect the character and environment of Jericho and ‘heighten the bar’ for developers, ensuring a better quality of design and development.
Contrary to some beliefs, it is not proposed to request an ‘Article 4 Direction’ which would remove the permitted development rights of householders. Individuals would still be allowed to improve their properties with such works as rear extensions.
In the circumstances, the decision of the Executive Board was as good as can be expected, but the community must continue to exert pressure on councillors to ensure the bid for funding is made as forcibly as possible when the City Council’s budget is drafted later this year.
Paul Hornby, Walton Cresent
Emma Cavell warns of a disappearing culture
The City Council is to be congratulated on this decision. As an historic suburb and the principal working-class district of nineteenth-century Oxford, Jericho still has the architectural evidence and ambience of a vanished industrial past. Factory workers’ dwellings, pubs, worksheds and yards, shopfronts, wharfs, canal-front buildings, and backstreets that have remained little changed in over a century, all bear witness to the activities of the poorer men and women of Victorian Oxford and recall a working-class life that is in danger of being forgotten.
Buildings and landscapes represent the irreplaceable artefacts of social history – offering tangible, material evidence of people’s lives, and conveying a sense of the past that cannot be gained from written records.
Oxford’s industrial past is as important as the history of its more affluent educated inhabitants, and its lesser buildings as deserving of protection as the monumental structures and large mock-Gothic houses of wealthy Victorians. The fate of many characteristic Jericho sites – the demolition and re-development of Lucy’s, the construction of the unappealing (and now redundant) Grantham House, and the conversion of The Globe, to name but a few examples – foretell the district’s disturbing future if unsupervised change is allowed to continue. Jericho is a truly unique monument both to England’s industrial heritage and to Oxford’s own evolution. It must not be allowed to deteriorate further.
Designation would be be a critical first step, but not the end of the story. It will not protect the individual features of privately-owned buildings, and it will not stop the replacement of original doors and windows with plastic.The care, concern and continued vigilance of Jericho residents will be an imperative if we truly wish to preserve an irreplaceable piece of Oxford’s, indeed England’s, industrial past.
Emma Cavell, Cranham Terrace
