Headington Headlines #386

TonyOX3

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 path with tarmac and gravel
The path with tarmac and gravel

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.

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

  • Parking Enforcement

Headington Headlines #385

TonyOX3

Your weekly round-up of local news for 10 – 16 September.

The planning application for the Swan School, refused by East Area Planning Committee last week, has been called in by city councillors. This means the application – and the refusal – will be reconsidered by the Planning Review Committee. For more information see this post.

The Big Draw organisation is putting on another pavement chalking event in Headington centre next Saturday, 22 September.

Campaigners hoping to re-open the Somerset pub on Marston Road opened a ‘pop-up pub’ opposite the site for a few hours on Sunday.

The Headington & Marston e-democracy forum has come back to life with a discussion about parking on pavements and double yellow lines in Headington:

    • Parking enforcement

Swan School planning application refused.

TonyOX3

The planning application for the Swan School (ref: 18/01173/FUL), refused by East Area Planning Committee on 5 September, has been called in by city councillors. This means the application – and the refusal – will be reconsidered by the Planning Review Committee. The minutes of the EAPC meeting show that the reasons for refusing the application were its impact on the Green Belt and a failure to ensure that access to the site gives priority to pedestrians and cyclists. The earliest date for the PRC to consider the matter is 10 October, though as yet this date is not definite.

At the EAPC meeting there were two votes on the application, the first to approve the application and the second to refuse it on the grounds mentioned above. Thanks to the report by Sophie Grubb (@OxMailSophieG) in the Oxford Mail we know that Councillors Nigel Chapman (Lab, Headington Hill & Northway), David Henwood (Lab, Cowley) and John Tanner (Lab, Littlemore) voted to approve the application; Shaista Aziz (Lab, Rose Hill & Iffley), Mary Clarkson (Lab, Marston), Alex Hollingsworth (Lab, Carfax), Mark Lygo (Lab, Churchill) and Roz Smith (LibDem, Quarry & Risinghurst) voted against. Stef Garden (LibDem, Headington) abstained, so the vote was 5-3 against the application with one abstention.

On the second vote, to refuse the application, the voting was the same (or more accurately, reversed) except that Shaista Aziz abstained instead of supporting the motion so the result was 4-3 in favour of refusal with two abstentions.