Grenoble Road is Oxford’s southern city boundary.
On one side, the Blackbird Ley’s estate, an expanding science park and Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium, which will be hosting Championship football next month.
On the other, the wheat fields and wooded hills of the Oxfordshire Green Belt, a bucolic view interrupted only by a line of pylons marching west from Didcot power station, and on which, in theory, not a brick can be laid.
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It is a perfect example of the principles that lay behind the Green Belt concept, introduced into British widespread planning practice in the 1950s.
The aim was and remains to prevent urban sprawl, ensuring cities retain practical and pleasant density, while offering the amenity of the great outdoors to those who live there.
Michael Tice wants to keep it that way.
A member of the Oxfordshire branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, he has been campaigning in retirement since 1993, but even he has had to admit defeat on Grenoble Road.
A 3,000-home development, linked to the science park that hosts the new Ellison Institute of technology, funded by billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellisson, has been given planning permission on the Green Belt land.
Michael tells me this proves that current planning law is already too permissive when it comes to protecting the countryside, and Labour’s reforms will only make that harder.
Michael Tice says locals are on the side of tightening planning laws to protect the countryside
