Portmeadow
What it used to look like ….
Above: Winter 2008, before RDW
Below: Watercolour by Valerie Petts
A before and after in one shot….
Oxford in flood 14th January 2014 – building on the flood plain. RDW are the white buildings
… here are the buildings at night with the light pouring out, and they’re not even fully occupied yet.
We were repeatedly told that light pollution would be minimised.
Save Port Meadow 
(with apologies to Hopkins)
Unfair, unfair have risen
Like a Category A prison
Clad badly in battleship grey
Demonic from the dregs
Of “How to sidestep planning regs”
Schemed by some uni factotum
With one hand on his scrotum
And another on his wallet
We who love the meadow
Could accommodate that fellow
Beneath the growing green
In a box of oaken sheen
And likewise would deliver
Oxford planners to the river
it took 10 strokes for Hopkins’s trees
How many blokes to dream up these?
Brick by brick they hem us in;
Damn us all, and hem us in.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew— 10
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all, 15
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 20
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Gerald Manley Hopkins ‘BINSEY POPLARS