Intolerable Intruder

For centuries, Britain's poets have sung of Oxford's "dreaming spires"; but they have done some worrying about them, too. Shops and factories have been creeping in upon the spires like jungle weed--"a base and brickish skirt," cried Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1879, that "sours that neighbor-nature thy grey beauty is grounded best in . . ." Last week the base and brickish skirt was creating a bitterer furor than ever. The center of the storm: the Oxford and District Gas Co.

Until last month, Oxonians thought they had got rid of the big intruder, after a four-year battle that began back in 1945. By that year, the gasworks had already spread to within a quarter of a mile of Christ Church, had ruined the view of Folly Bridge, was besmirching Pembroke College with smoke and soot. As if that were not enough, the company announced that it was about to build a new gas retort, 92 ft. high. With that, townsmen, gownsmen, and the entire city council rose in wrath.

The council did not want the company simply to stop growing; at a series of public meetings, it demanded that the gas people clear out of town entirely. A parliamentary committee backed the council up. So did the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The company had no alternative but to back down. It promised it would move to suburban Cowley.

But the company never did get around to moving, and last month it suddenly announced that it had given up the whole idea. Instead, it said, it was going to expand right there in Oxford. The first thing it planned to build: its new gas retort, 92 ft. high.

Once again, Oxford bristled with protests. The vice chancellor of the University, the mayor of the town, and the chairman of the county council composed a joint letter to the Times. Lord Halifax, Lord Bledisloe, Lord. Pakenham and Lord Samuel signed another. The whole affair, said their lordships, was "intolerable." The city council's planning committee echoed the theme: the company's plan "ought never to have been made and should be disposed of summarily."

Last week the city council did summarily dispose of the company's application for permission to build. But this time, many Oxonians doubted that the esthetic victory would hold. With Britain's steel so short, the company had a powerful argument against building a whole new plant in Cowley, and the Minister of Fuel and Power was almost sure to agree. Oxford's dreaming spires, said one gas company official last week, would just have to make the best of things: "I think the gasworks will be on its present site 25 and even 50 years from now."

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