What's wrong with Oxpens River Bridge? 

A much-loved section of the Grandpont Nature Park is under threat from a totally pointless £10million cycle and pedestrian bridge less than two minutes walk from an existing and perfectly functional one. We believe the bridge to be unwise, unnecessary and undemocratic. Join us in opposing this gratuitous sacrifice of a much-loved community woodland for the sake of a costly white elephant for which there is neither need nor demand. 

The proposed Oxpens River Bridge is... 

Unwise 

• Destruction of the Nature Park as we know it 

“In its section on ‘local amenity,’ the planning application considered the impact of the bridge on views of the Park from neighbouring homes. But what was completely left out was the impact on us, the local residents, the people who actually use and love Grandpont Nature Park.

This place is so important . We have a little bit of countryside here on our doorstep. We don’t have to get in a car -  we can walk to it from home. It’s where we go to restore our sanity, it’s part of our well being.

One day when we were tree guarding we counted over 500 people walking on a favourite stretch of the path, where there are trees on either side, and you can feel  you are in a wood. There were dog walkers, families with children, people, quite a few elderly, like me, all just happy to be out enjoying  nature. In a  relaxed and peaceful way.                   

The Oxpens Bridge would put an end to all this.  The trees surrounding the path would nearly all  go . The  paths would be widened to twice their present width, the little hill flattened and the surfaces asphalted. The balance between  pedestrians and cyclists would be changed. We would be left with a straight, wide, flat , smooth, treeless cycle track, totally unsuitable for walkers, out for their constitutional stroll. 

The destruction of  this area is very personal to me. I have watched it grow from  poisoned gasworks ground to a haven for nature. I am heartbroken to see  Grandpont Nature Park  being demoted to a fast urban cycleway.” - Roo Glazebrook, Grandpont resident for over fifty years. 

• Health and wellbeing 

The construction of the bridge requires the destruction of a copse of trees in the nature Park opposite the ice rink.  The Council states that  the location of the bridge ‘avoids landing at the most ecologically sensitive and heavily wooded area on the southern side of the Thames. ‘ (Planning Statement, 6.4.6), but in fact it is the exact opposite. This copse of trees is the only part of the riverside pedestrian/ cycle path which is wooded on both sides the entire distance of the path from the eastern bypass beyond Iffley in East Oxford to Osney in West Oxford. This particular wooded stretch is used by hundreds of people every day, and for many, perhaps most, this will be the only part of their day in which they are surrounded by trees on all sides. The impact of trees on wellbeing (and even reducing crime!) is well-documented and unambiguous. Yet all these people, so many of whom have stopped to tell us of their love for this space, will be stripped of this important contribution to their mental and emotional health. 

• Carbon impact 

The construction industry is the single biggest contributor to the UK’s carbon footprint, contributing almost half of total emissions. As a result, a consensus now exists amongst architects and engineers that new building work should be avoided wherever alternatives (such as retrofitting existing structures) are possible. This is, for example, the current position of the Chartered Institute of Surveyors, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architects Journal, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. Even the Council’s own consultation document for the bridge (2022-07-14_oxford_pc_boards-1.pdf) accepts that the “Build Less principle should be the focus of the conversation” for the early stages of planning. The document then quotes current best practice where the top tier of reducing emissions is to “Build Nothing” and the first question for any development should be “Challenge the brief - is construction the answer?” Given the existence of a perfectly functioning existing bridge less than 2 minutes walk away, we believe the answer to this question is a resounding ‘no.’ 

The Council have so far released no estimate of the amount of embedded carbon in their proposed bridge, suggesting they have either never bothered to find out or are keeping it a closely-guarded secret. 

• Waste of public money 

The project is estimated to cost over £10million of entirely public money. This is despite the fact that the main beneficiary will be the University, given the stated aim is to facilitate their proposed Osney Mead development. The Council argue that they will get all this money from central government and therefore may as well go ahead with it given that they won’t be paying for it themselves. This is a fallacious and dangerous argument, on two grounds. 

Firstly, public money is public money, and it is thoroughly parochial and immoral to suggest that somehow the money will be ‘wasted’ if it goes somewhere other than Oxford. Let this money go to something useful, even if it is in another part of the country. 

Secondly, although the grant has indeed been agreed, it is conditional on the project being completed by March 2025. If it is not, the Council will have to pay back every penny. For the Council to actually access the grant money, then, relies on the project, a major infrastructure development which has not yet even received planning permission, being completed, to budget, in record time. To believe this achievable is an extraordinary piece of wishful thinking with no precedent to back it up. Indeed, if the East Oxford Community Centre redevelopment is anything to go by, it is total pie-in-the-sky. EOCC was closed for redevelopment back in the summer of 2022, and the grand total of work undertaken so far consists of the demolition of the annexes and the construction of a fence. Its completion is years off, even by their own estimates - and that is just a renovation! How do the Council, with this track record, think that they are going to complete an entire infrastructure project from scratch in one year? More likely is that, come March 2025, the people of Oxford will be left with half a bridge and a bill of £7million and rising. Is the transformation of a 15 minute walk into town into a 12 minute walk for a handful of future students really the best use of this money in a city with 3000+ people on the council house waiting list? 

• Unresolved problems 

The path connecting the proposed new bridge with the future Osney Mead development it is supposed to serve is narrow, frequently flooded, on a steep elevation, and goes under a low railway bridge. In a meeting with local residents in February 2024, Council officers admitted they do not know how to deal with these issues and are relying on the University to work out how to resolve them in the future. Essentially they are planning to go ahead with the bridge despite the fact that they admit that there’s a bottleneck and a whole host of obstacles to resolving it which they have no idea of how to deal with. 

Unnecessary 

The proposed site of the Oxpens River Bridge is less than two minutes walk (or a 30-second cycle ride) from the existing Gasworks Bridge that links South Oxford to Oxpens meadow and the City Centre. Indeed, even the Council’s leading public proponent of the plan, Anna Railton, has admitted that it is not currently needed; in her presentation to the planning committee on 19th March, she said the bridge should be supported because it was good to get such infrastructure in “before it’s needed.” 

The whole rationale for the bridge is that it will supposedly “unlock” new development at Osney Mead. The development planned for this site is a new University Science and Business Park. The housing component of this proposed development is minimal - 600 student rooms in a site that is estimated to employ around 4000 people. By bringing in new workers without providing the necessary housing, this development will drive up housing costs in the city, exacerbating the city’s housing crisis. Yet the money for the bridge comes from funds which are supposed to increase the availability of affordable housing! £8.8 million is to come from the Oxfordshire Housing and Growth Deal, whose purpose is to “ensure that people can live in affordable homes” and “meet the needs of people who cannot afford to buy on the open market.” The rest comes from the Housing Infrastructure Fund, which is also supposed to be used to facilitate housing projects, not Business Parks. Using these funds to subsidise what is effectively a private commercial venture of the University - and one which will increase unaffordability and homelessness in the town - is a flagrant, if not fraudulent, abuse of these funds. 

Over the years, the Council’s reasons for supporting the bridge have ranged from the bizarre to the ridiculous: 

• The original grant application for the bridge (to the Department of Transport’s Cycle City Ambition fund) put forward in 2015 claimed it was aimed at reducing traffic. Yet it is hard to conceive of a single car journey currently undertaken that would be rendered redundant by this bridge. Are people in South Oxford or Osney currently driving to the Westgate? Have the Council collected any data on how many people are currently driving into Oxford but would not do so if the existing cycle bridge was replicated? Of course they haven’t. Because the answer is clearly zero. 

• According to a Council Cabinet meeting of 22 March 2022, the bridge is necessary “to enable an inclusive economy to deliver more affordable housing and pursue a zero carbon Oxford.”. This is totally spurious on all fronts. 

• “Affordable housing”? There is no affordable housing planned for the Osney Mead site, which is a University development primarily comprising commercial sites, scientific labs and housing for graduate students. To claim student rooms as ‘affordable housing’ is to stretch the already-much abused term beyond all recognition.  

• “”Zero-carbon”? As the bridge is simply replicating an existing pedestrian and cycle route, there is no carbon being saved, and not a single car journey will be eliminated by the venture. However, the huge steel and concrete structure will undoubtedly have a massive carbon footprint of its own (see below, under the ‘unwise’ section!). 

• “Inclusive economy”?  It’s anyone’s guess what that’s supposed to mean. One gets the impression the Council have just tipped a box of vogue-sounding funding buzzwords onto the table, hoping that one of them will somehow stick. 

• In late February 2024, in a meeting with Council officers, a brand new rationale emerged: that the bridge was necessary for the ‘safe flood evacuation’ of the (student) residents of the future Osney Mead development! Yet to access the bridge, the residents would have to first pass under the railway bridge through a section of the towpath that itself regularly floods! (see picture below!) One wonders why the residents would choose to evacuate through a flooded Nature Park rather than via the road. Exactly how much flooding are the Council expecting their new developments on the flood plain to produce?? 

In reality, the Council’s arguments for building the bridge are increasingly boiling down to this: ‘the funds can only be used for this bridge, so we may as well build it.’ Councillor Anna Railton, who has been spearheading the Council’s defence of the bridge, has said “there's very little that this money could've been spent on … it's this bridge or nothing.” This is supposedly so because the bulk of the money for the bridge - £8.8 million - is to come from the Oxfordshire Housing and Growth Deal, presumably from the £150million part of the pot that is for infrastructure which ‘unlocks’ new housing developments. The bridge will supposedly ‘unlock’ the University’s planned forthcoming development at Osney Mead. Yet this development is not a housing development, but yet another Science and Business Park intended to employ 4000 workers. The only housing element of the plan is for 600 student rooms. By providing housing for only a fraction (around 1/7th!) of those on the site, the development will intensify pressure on Oxford’s housing market, pushing prices up, making the city more unaffordable and increasing homelessness. Yet the purpose of the Growth Deal money being used to fund this bridge is to “ensure that people can live in affordable homes” and “meet the needs of people who cannot afford to buy on the open market.” Using this fund to subsidise what is effectively a private commercial venture of the University is a flagrant - if not fraudulent - abuse of this fund. 

In fact, that fund could be used for upgrades to infrastructure elsewhere in the city that would actually meet local needs. Much of the money for the bridge had originally been earmarked for long-planned, much-needed improvements to pedestrian and cycle routes along Woodstock and Banbury Roads. Those have now been axed and the funds diverted to meet the rising costs of the bridge. 

Undemocratic 

• Breaching democratic safeguards 

• Neither of the new developments the bridge is supposed to link (Oxpens and Osney Mead), have yet received planning permission. The Osney development - which the bridge is being built to serve - is years away even from an application being submitted. Nor did the Council have the Forestry Commision licence it required for the amount of trees it began to fell in February 2024. That they are not now facing prosecution for illegal felling is solely due to the intervention of local residents who maintained a vigil on the site to prevent further damage being done until the Forestry Commission arrived and declared their plans illegal. 

• Lack of meaningful consultation 

• Although the residents of Osney Island and St Ebbes were engaged with (as well as Oxford Civic Society, Cyclox, Oxford Preservation Trust and Trust Fields in Trust), the residents of Grandpont were not. Short notice was given for a walkabout on 19th July 2022, but as this was the hottest day of the year and the government advice  was to stay indoors, very few were able to attend. Another date was requested, but this never happened.

• Serving the University’s private interests, not the public good. 

• According to the local plan published in 2016, the bridge’s construction is a requirement for the building of the University’s proposed Osney Mead development, and Council officials have repeatedly made clear that the purpose of the bridge is to ‘unlock’ that development. If this were true, it would seem the University is calling the shots, imposing its gratuitous demands on Council spending at a time of a severe public funding crisis.