19 october 2017 oxfordshire guardian city

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City edition Thursday, October 19 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017

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oxfordshireguardian.co.uk

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Neighbours’ concerns over the development of station By Eva Astreinidou THE £125million proposals to rebuild Oxford’s rail station could be approved soon, despite a lukewarm response from neighbours. Oxford city executive board met on Monday to discuss the next steps for the rail station masterplan after an early stage public consultation. Oxford City Council leader Bob Price said the final plans, which will include further amendments for areas of concern, will be decided by planning officers in the next month. Concerns raised from the consultation included increased congestion from additional short-stay car parking and drop-off points on residential roads, particularly Roger Dudman Way, Abbey Road and Cripley Road. Campaign group The Abbey and Cripley Road Residents’ Association said the masterplan ‘lacks consideration of local residents’ and that the scale of the building will change the local character due to loss of light and trees. In response, city council representatives said: “The [masterplan] will be changed to reduce the overall impact on the west side of the station, trees retained and short-stay parking relocated [to Becket Street].” Cllr Price also said there would be further work on the proposed bus

network around the station in the final version. The draft plans for a bus interchange were criticised by travel companies for not being suited to high frequency services. They added that the location of the bus interchange would potentially increase the walking time for passengers between bus and train. The idea behind the masterplan drawn up by the city council, Oxfordshire County Council and Network Rail is to ‘provide an exemplary gateway to Oxford’. The partners want the station to ‘act as a catalyst to encourage a wider regeneration in Oxford’. They say the redevelopment of the station has the potential to bring further economic benefits to the city through the potential re-opening of the Cowley branch line linking the city centre to the Cowley area. Last week, Network Rail said more needs to be done in terms of tapping into future sources of funding. They also said that there has been ‘insufficient’ assessment of pedestrian flows which in turn does not take future passenger growth into enough account. The executive board has recognised that further detailed work on forecasting of passenger numbers will need to be carried out to achieve this. Work on the station, if approved, will not start until the early 2020s.

Picture: @TonyMcDougal1

College dips into the record books HISTORY was made over the weekend as the Guinness World Record for the most people dipping egg ‘soldiers’ simultaneously was officially broken.

To celebrate world egg day on Friday, Exeter College hatched a unique plan to get 183 people to simultaneously dunk toast soldiers into soft-boiled eggs. To break the record everyone

had to dunk each soldier twice and eat the eggy toast at the same time. Staff, fellows and students beat the previous record of 178 soldiers in Gloucestershire in 2014.

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