Your weekly round-up of local news for 17 – 23 September .

If you use the Marston cycle path @Marstonbikepath you’ll be pleased to know that it’s been resurfaced between the Cherwell bridge and South Parks Road. When I rode it they were still working on it. The shared section between the two bridges was being laid in gravel on tar. The South Parks Road end had nice smooth tarmac for bikes and gravel/tar for pedestrians, but I gather this may have also become 100% gravel. This seems a strange choice. I hope I’m wrong, but with bikes using it as well as people on foot I’ll be surprised if this surface survives the winter without starting to break up.

The City Council is advertising for a Locality Officer for Barton. A significant part of the job will be working on the ‘Healthy New Towns’ initiative – see my posts Health and Fitness in Barton Park and HH 280 for the background.

The Planning Review Committee meeting to reconsider the refusal of the Swan School application (see this earlier post) has been scheduled for Monday 15 October. Meanwhile, the school is accepting applications for admissions in September 2019. Does it really only take 11 months to build a school and all its associated infrastructure?

Meanwhile a group identifying themselves solely as ‘a group of Marston families’ is calling for signatures on a petition, although they don’t tell you the actual wording of the petition. It just seems to be ‘leave your name and email address if you want the school to go ahead’. The person starting the petition is named as Tessa Clayton; the Swan School has promoted the petition on their own twitter feed. Beware phishing – you might want to read change.org’s privacy policy before clicking to sign the petition.

Cllr Roz Smith reports that the long-awaited rectification of the Latimer Road parking restrictions will happen on and after 1 October. The wrong road markings were painted in after Beech House construction finished.

Latimer Road update, 1st Oct parking suspended, road to be swept & re-painting of parking lines etc @HeadingtonNews @SGarden13 @maltafkhan @oxmailFranW

— Roz Smith (@RosalindRogers) September 19, 2018

Active posts on the Headington & Marston e-democracy forum this week:

• Parking Enforcement