Headington Headlines #50

TonyOX3

Here’s my weekly round-up of local news for 13 – 19 February —

A power cut just after mid-day on Tuesday hit Headington and a much wider area. Time out varied locally from a few minutes to more than quarter of an hour. Apparently it was caused by workmen accidentally cutting through a cable. There was another power cut affecting parts of Marston and Headington for several hours on Saturday.

The row over Woodeaton Quarry resurfaced this week with local residents still unhappy about the plans to use the quarry to dump solid waste. My blog post from last August shows where the quarry is.

Oxford Brookes Restaurant joined twitter – @OBRestaurant. Computer games and comics store Lazygamer @LazyGamerUK didn’t meet its opening date target of Friday. They hope it’ll be sometime this week.

Dismay over the roadworks in the Highfield area continued with many people failing to see the rationale behind the changes. @RuthWilk wrote: The County Council will set up a build-out in All Saints Road next Monday 20 February. Residents have raised concerns about traffic cutting the corner when turning right at speed into Latimer Road from the Lime Walk/Stapleton Road direction. This is a pilot and the new layout will be monitored to see how well it works.

Pupils from St Andrew’s School made 24 bird boxes for Bury Knowle Park under guidance from the Friends of Bury Knowle Park and the RSPB. The boxes were funded by Headington Action. (Report via @RuthWilk).

Headington Action is also encouraging residents to pull out all the stops and make Headington "out-do all the other areas of Oxford this year" in organising Diamond Jubilee street parties. (Warning: this link to @TheOxfordMail‘s article will get you one of their Very Annoying full-screen adverts which completely obliterates the start of the article.) The street party initiative is being led by @OxStreets, aka Oxford Streets for People under the auspices of @OxCivicSoc.

The new bus timetables for routes 8 & 9 started yesterday (Sunday 19 Feb). We’ll have to wait to see if it makes any difference.

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

  • Clarification needed on the joint ticketing bus scheme.
  • A festival of street parties in Headington during the Jubilee weekend?
  • The Friar Pub Marston and Tesco

I try to cover news from the OX3 postcode in Headington and out as far as Barton, Sandhills and Risinghurst (see map). To feed into next week’s summary you can comment on this article, or tweet either with the hashtag #ox3 or @mentioning @TonyOX3.