Views: Oxford must build the homes it needs without losing what makes it unique

Maxine Reynolds, head of Oxford residential sales at Bidwells, discusses how Oxford can achieve its housing targets whilst maintaining its identity:

The government’s commitment to a development corporation for Oxford, and its decision to create a standalone Greater Oxford Council, underline the seriousness with which national and local politicians are taking the city’s housing crisis.

The development corporation would give Oxford a single body able to purchase land and build new housing at the scale the city needs, and the new Greater Oxford Council gives that body a single planning authority covering the city and its green belt rather than a patchwork of competing interests.

The direction of travel is unlikely to change with a new Prime Minister. Once established through statute, a development corporation does not depend on the government that created it, in the same way the London Docklands and Milton Keynes development corporations continued their work across successive changes of prime minister and party.

Before the Oxford development corporation’s consultation begins, however, it is worth asking what kind of growth our city needs and wants.

The city’s economic weight is easy to underestimate from the top of the Carfax Tower. Two in three of the jobs forecast for Oxford between now and 2035 will sit in knowledge-intensive industries, and the volume of lab and advanced engineering space has doubled in five years. This is a city competing for the same scientists, engineers and postdoctoral researchers as Boston, Zurich and Singapore. It is also a city that is struggling to put a roof over the heads of the people who make that competition possible.

Research carried out for Bidwells found that the average commute among Oxford renters is already the longest of any major UK city, driven by its citizens being pushed further out by the cost of rent, with average rents having risen by a third over the past five years. And Bidwells’ own analysis of the city’s growth trajectory suggests Greater Oxford’s population could grow by 44 per cent over the next fifteen years, from 240,000 to 345,000, requiring roughly 40,000 additional homes by 2040.

Homes designed and built for renters, known as ‘build to rent’, one of the few housing types capable of delivering homes at pace, remains a fraction of what the city needs relative to demand. In this context, a talented doctoral researcher with their choice of positions at a science or tech firm may well choose to move abroad rather than stay in Oxford. 

The temptation, in a city as visually protected as Oxford, is to frame this as a binary choice between building more homes and losing the spires, or preserving the city’s character and losing the graduates.

This is simply not true. Jericho and Summertown, now among the most sought-after and carefully conserved parts of the city, were built at densities well above what most modern planning committees would wave through. The Victorians who built them were not profit-chasing developers. They understood something the current debate too often forgets, which is that terraces, mansion blocks and mews housing can deliver significantly more homes per hectare than a scattering of suburban cul-de-sacs, while producing streets that people want to walk down rather than drive through.

Groups such as Create Streets have made this argument at a national level for years. That is considerately designed density allows Britain’s cities to deliver large numbers of homes without losing their identity.

Applied to Oxford, that means directing growth to where it does the least damage and delivers the most benefits. Concentrating new homes around transport nodes such as Bicester North and Bicester Village, where the infrastructure to support them already exists, is a more deliverable route than fighting over greenfield land at the city’s edge. The development corporation should also consider converting underused commercial buildings and infilling backland sites within the ring road before reaching beyond it.

We should also hold new development to the same principles the city’s historic terraces already abide by, that being houses and low-rise flats that sit comfortably next to what is already there, built from materials that match the street.

That is the reasoning behind Bidwells’ new residential agency in Oxford that puts sales, lettings and new homes in the same team as the planners and land specialists who work out what a site can actually deliver. In practice, that means the people advising a landowner or developer on what to build are sitting next to the people who will end up selling or renting it to an Oxford tenant or buyer, rather than the two only meeting once building work has already started.

The consultation for the Greater Oxford Development Corporation, when it arrives, will be a crucial moment for the city’s councils, developers and residents to decide what kind of growth we want.

Oxford does not have to choose between its history and its future. It has already built the proof, street by Victorian street, that it can have both. The task now is to build it again, deliberately, before the city’s own success prices out the very people who sustain it.