Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s presentation to Flood Enquiry
Although I am a member of the Oxford Flood and Environment Group, my statement today is a personal one, addressed to the difference between ticking boxes and the actualities and experiences on the ground, and the material importance of residents' feelings and knowledge. I
have lived in Osney Island since 2003, and my house there was badly flooded in 2007. But proximity to the West Oxford Green Corridor is important to me and I have stayed in Osney. For environmental reasons (an easy decision to sustain in a hopelessly congested city such as Oxford, in which able-bodied walking is quicker than most car trips), I have never owned a car in Oxford. I therefore walk a great deal– for work, to buy necessities, and, crucially, on a daily basis, for recreation, as so many other people do, from a life largely spent at one desk or another.
1).Consultation: Neither I nor any other residents have been consulted as far as I know in identifying public access land, and explaining how they use the open spaces referenced in S-19: there has just been a little random monitoring that seems to have missed many patterns of use.
2). The proposed S-19 areas of open space land in seven localities:
- Seacourt Nature Park,
- Oatlands Recreation Ground,
- Kendall Copse,
- Kennington Pools,
- Grandpont Nature Park & Dean’s Ham Meadow,
- Hinksey Park,
- Botley Park.
Except for Kendall Close and Kennington Pools, I regularly walk in five of these areas for recreation, whether to exercise the dog or to observe spring flowers or the beauty of frosted winter cobwebs on scrub and hedgerows or to enjoy the presence and shade in summer of the many mature trees and other refreshing and calming aspects of these well used and much loved greenfield areas. The advantageousness of each area is deeply bound up with the varying nature of its bio-diversity, and, as the Acquisition of Land Act 1981 requires, exchange land should be of equal advantageousness to the public. In some of these cases it is not.
Parcel (a), Seacourt Nature Park: The Jewson’s Field area of Seacourt Park is stated by the EA to be in private ownership and to be a ‘cut-through’. I cannot improve on the detailed evidence submitted by Professor Therivel and Mr O’Hara in showing the omissions and faults in the EA’s identification of Jewson’s field as exchange land, but I can state that it has been freely accessible for my 20 years of walking in the area. The dog and I particularly enjoy walking around Jewson’s Field on spring and summer evenings, when the dog believes she will be able to catch the many rabbits who appear then. Walking in the copses, I much enjoy the populations of teazles and other wildflowers and of elderflower and hawthorn shrubs in season. One summer, some of the homeless people who stay in the area had constructed a most ingenious couch out of old pallets on which they sat to enjoy the shade of the copse, shade of which we will all stand in great need as our cities heat up to intolerable summers when we will so sorely want the power of mature trees to lower temperatures by 5-10 degrees. Relevant here too, is the importance of a mixed environment, including an element of wildness. ‘Parkifyng’ green space too much removes any sense of nature’s having its own means and ways of being.
In Jewson’s Field, as in other West Oxford locations such as Hinksey Meadow (part of which is proposed to be counted in with Jewson’s Field as exchange land), I and all the other people who walk recreationally do not walk through, but around spaces. I have hardly ever been in Hinksey Meadow when there are not other people walking or dog walking at different points around the circuit of the meadow (as well, of course, as picnicking or just sitting among the wildflower grassland in the Meadow, or helping the fritillary count, or even painting the Meadow). The optimal recreational walk is instinctively circular for most people and that is what West Oxford residents do in these spaces. The claim that Jewson’s Field is only a cut-through is simply not true to my 20 years' experience. And using Hinksey Meadow as exchange land to supplement Jewson’s field when the Meadow is already so well used as a recreational site for the enjoyment of spectacular bio-diversity (itself quite probably to be destroyed by the scheme as the EA admits) is galling.
Parcel b: Oatlands Park: land by the Electric Railway path is proposed in exchange for loss of land in Oatlands Park. Much has already been said about the effects of the bund in the Park, so I will just add some points about the proposed exchange land along the electric railway:
(i) It is already heavily used public space, but by a different demographic from that of Oatlands itself – adult joggers, dog-walkers, and formerly, people blackberrying, but not young unaccompanied children. This is grassland and scrub, with some MG4 fragments (suggesting it should be regenerated, not used as a substitute for park grass). It also serves as a wildlife corridor. It is not an area where parents can leave their children to play as they do in Oatlands Park. The Oxford police have already said in an another case of exchange land for recreational space used by children that land that is not overlooked by houses is not safe for children to play in.
Parcel e : Grandpont Park. Again a well used and much loved public space and one which, looked at from residents‘ holistic viewpoint, is already planned to have a key area taken out of use (the crown of the park with at least 22 mature trees and their accompanying narcissi and slipper-orchid glades to be destroyed with public money for the benefit of a private developer (the University of Oxford). Our green spaces and bio-diversity are being chipped away at from a variety of directions and should be subject to much more monitoring of the cumulative effects. And again though marginal scrubland is in question for the EA’s exchange, these wilder parts of public areas are among the few remaining corridors for the savagely depleted wildlife of southern England. They are also not without benefit for the public: in other parts of Grandpont, wilder vegetation along the railway partially screens it from walkers and other users. A holistic approach to greenfield is needed to match the range of what greenfield can do and the holistic nature of residents’ experience of it.
Parcel g: Botley Park. Although the EA says no exchange land is in question for the change of rights along the margin of Botley Park, I fear the worst. That side of the park is a belt of trees and scrub, with beautiful sprinklings of narcissi in the grass underneath them in spring. When we have reluctantly to finish our walk round the park, the dog and I always leave by that route because it is so pleasant and so unsuburbanised as to feel like a last little piece of countryside. The EA’s change of rights is likely to mean destruction of this particularly precious little strip’s character. Again, an element of wildness plays a role in the setting of public recreational green space, and in the complex value residents see, and themselves participate in creating, in their greenfield areas.
3)The importance of nature recreation for mental health: intense civic protest over Sheffield’s and Portsmouth’s City Councils' reckless ways with their trees (as a result of which some councillors lost their positions) and general distress over the Sycamore Gap tree show how strongly and powerfully people feel they need trees and green spaces. And they are right: recent research in environmental neuroscience shows that far from being a luxury, green environments of many kinds are a necessity for the human brain to function well: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/nov/27/the-nature-cure-how-time-outdoors-transforms-our-memory-imagination-and-logic
4) General conclusions The larger context of the S-19 enquiry here is relevant and important. Through the Environment Agency’s main CPO order of some 1000 parcels of land, residents face the loss of our greatest environmental treasure- the West Oxford green corridor. So great is the bio-diversity loss that the EA plans to reach mandatory biodiversity net gain by planting whips etc on offsite areas of land they have not yet been able to specify. Of what use is that to local residents?
And now we are supposed to accept some land that we already use as exchange land for the publicly used land we are due to lose. This is exchange land we could have helped better to identify if more meaningful forms of consultation were adopted, so that affected residents needn’t find out at the last minute what is proposed, and so that the evidential weight of residents' knowledge and experience could be part of the planning process, instead of something tacked on at the end, when all the boxes have already been ticked in a large organization’s planning.
As I have shown earlier, I already have access and already use as open space land proposed for exchange, so when the EA takes that land in ‘exchange’ for what I am losing to its main CPO, it is not exchange but double robbery.