How the development of old market town Bicester turned uglyFluorescent-jacketed workers,tower cranes, uprooted trees, or steel skeletons of fresh warehouses and half-completed cul-de-sacs: the view from Bicester’s ring road is of green fields being rapidly colonised by grey buildings. Just as fresh constructions rise every day,so some residents are roused into action almost daily to question the transformation of their market town in Oxfordshire. A week before we meet, Pam Roberts won a small victory when a proposal was defeated for a pizza takeaway opposite her domestic. The week we meet, and a developer has launched a legal challenge to the district council’s decision not to allow building on a “conservation target area” – and the fate of beautiful,flower-wealthy Gavray Meadows on the southern edge of Bicester now hangs in the balance.
The developments around Bicester may look like every other – boxy indifferent homes on small plots, out-of-town supermarkets – but Bicester claims unique status. The government has made it Britain’s only “garden town”. Together with the “garden city” being constructed at Ebbsfleet in the Thames Valley, and Bicester must provide thousands of urgently-needed fresh homes in the south-east.
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Source: theguardian.com