Headington Headlines #284

TonyOX3

Your weekly round-up of local news for 19 – 25 September.

While we wait for confirmation of when and where the heatpipe roadworks will start, the County Council has opened applications for short-term visitors’ parking permits for people who will have work going on outside their houses. You can apply here.

Nor do we have any firm details yet about the timing of the Access to Headington road works. All we have at the moment is that work is scheduled to start on 17 October to reconfigure the Roosevelt Drive/Old Road junction. Among other changes this will provide two lanes coming out of Roosevelt Drive which is intended to provide more capacity for when Churchill Drive is closed for heatpipe work.

The latest fall-out in the sorry tale of Southern Health was the Chairman, Tim Smart, who resigned ‘for personal reasons’. His broadcast interview answering questions about Katrina Percy being slotted into a new job on the same salary with no due selection process showed a man out of his depth and out of control of the situation.

A motorcyclist suffered head injuries in a crash at Headington roundabout on Thursday morning. He was taken to the JR.

A burst water main flooded Trinity Road in Quarry on Wednesday.

Even grown-ups were discovering their inner 6 year old by doing chalk drawings on the pavement in Headington’s Big Draw on Saturday. Overnight rain had washed it all away by Sunday morning, but then ephemerality is part of the artistic concept, or so I’m told.

Just one active post on the Headington & Marston e-democracy forum this week:

  • Campaign Against Cuts to Services at Horton Hospital Banbury

Headington Headlines #283

TonyOX3

 

Your weekly round-up of local news for 12 – 18 September.

A 48 year old man was stabbed in Margaret Road in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday. He was taken to the JR Hospital. On Friday police issued descriptions of two men they wanted to speak to in connection with the incident. The victim was said to be in a stable condition, and his injuries not life-threatening.

The Boundary Commission’s proposals for Oxford East (see section 81 on p.20) show our constituency gaining two City Wards, North and St Margaret’s, which currently lie within Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood’s constituency). In the City Council, North Ward is Labour and St Margaret’s is LibDem.

Two sets of number plates were reported stolen over last weekend (10/11 September), one on the London Road near Ramsay Road, the other on Lime Walk.

St Andrew’s School Association joined twitter with a bit of a stammer as @sasastandrews1. They need your vote to help raise money for a new outdoor classroom.

Frontier Estates (the developers building the Beech House student accommodation on the corner of Latimer Road) are resurrecting a new version of the planning application they withdrew earlier this year to build a 55-bed care home at 1 Pullen’s Lane. I’ve drawn up a handy timeline of the ups and downs of this potential development.

Children at @WindmillOxford were featured on @BBCOxford as they celebrated the centenary of the birth of Roald Dahl on Tuesday by dressing up as their favourite characters.

Behind the security fencing on the pavement at the top of Headington Hill is a 15 metre gap in the old wall. Here’s the story.

Buongiorno e Buonasera opened as scheduled on Friday, and Oxford Vapours @OxfordVapours seems to be opening a vape shop in what was the old BBB Stores next to the old Post Office. They already have shops in Abingdon and Witney. A vape shop sells e-cigarettes and related products – see Oxford Vapours’ website for more details.

@JockOx3 felt good about his visit to a new Turkish barbers in Marston.

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

  • Margaret Road Pavilion
  • Campaign Against Cuts to Services at Horton Hospital Banbury
  • The Marston Barber

Headington Hill wall

TonyOX3

You may have noticed the security fencing on the pavement at the top of Headington Hill. Behind it there used to be an old stone wall, part of the wall round the Headington Hill Hall estate, now Brookes’ campus. All there is at the moment is the remains of a pile of rubble.

I’m told that the Brookes estates people were worried that this section of the wall was bulging badly, so they brought in specialist contracctors to rebuild it. Perhaps not surprisingly, once the contractors started to dismantle the wall they found that a whole stretch was likely to fall at any time. In the end they carried out a ‘controlled collapse’ of about a 15 metre length, leaving the gap you can see behind the fencing.

The wall will be rebuilt using as much of the original stone as possible.