Green Routes
Another article first published a year ago on WordPress:
Green Routes is a vegetarian café in which most of the menu is vegan, located on Magdalen Road, about two miles south-east of Oxford city centre (see map), in an area with traffic calming measures and 20 mph speed limits. So its name may be considered appropriate. Also on Magdalen Road are (amongst other retail and hospitality establishments) the Wild Honey wholefood shop, whose goods for sale are clearly not all vegan, though I did see vegan honea on sale; and the Magic Café, another vegetarian establishment, which on the day last month in January 2023 that I visited this area was unfortunately closed due to a bereavement. I have been into the Magic Café once before, well over ten years ago; at the time the only vegan selection on the menu was the soup, though the member of staff who told me wasn’t even sure of that!
Magdalen Road connects the Cowley and Iffley Roads, that converge at a large roundabout known as The Plain about half-way towards the city centre, which is itself then accessed by going over Magdalen Bridge. All the streets in the neighbourhood are mainly of Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, many of which have been converted to shared rented accommodation, mostly but not entirely occupied by students at Brookes University, the former Polytechnic. The traffic calming measures are common to some of the streets between Magdalen Road and The Plain. They are also common to the streets on the other side of Magdalen Road, as far as Howard Street, which also connects the Cowley and Iffley Roads. There are similar traffic calming measures on the streets on the other side of the Cowley Road, which itself as a highly commercialised, hence busy pedestrian area, also has a 20 mph speed limit. The most recent A-Z (2015) shows Magdalen Road and Howard Street as one-way, but in opposite directions, Magdalen Road from Iffley to Cowley Road, Howard Street the opposite.
Such traffic calming measures are usually introduced in response to residents’ concerns about their streets being used as short-cuts, ‘rat runs’ to use the British term, between main roads. Whether this was the case or not, I don’t know. The measures could have been in response to lobbying from green or road safety campaigners. This is an area where the Green Party has long had a high degree of electoral support and is one of those areas where Britain’s ecology movement started during the 1970’s (though as detailed on a previous post, the Ecology Party itself, from which the Green Party developed, started in Coventry). The Wild Honey shop occupies premises where the Inner Bookshop used to be after it had moved from the Cowley Road. As well as selling a wide range of green and New Age literature, the Inner Bookshop was also the base of the radical publication Green Line, which was always independent of the Green Party, though broadly supportive of its aims.
It was in this particular area of Oxford, known as St Clement’s ward, that Caroline Lucas started her political career as an Oxfordshire County Councillor thirty-one years ago (having failed the previous year to get elected to Oxford City Council). She later became a Member of the European Parliament and is to date the Green Party’s one and only MP in the UK Parliament (for Brighton Pavillion, more than a hundred miles away on the south coast). Her late Green Party colleague, Mike Woodin, was an Oxford City Councillor, elected the following year and who became one of the Green Party’s principal spokespeople. In 2004, shortly before his death, they published a book entitled Green Alternatives to Globalisation. Although the Green Party has found Oxford to be fertile territory for winning council seats, since the early 1990’s Oxford East Parliamentary constituency has gone from being moderately to very strongly pro-Labour, Anneliese Dodds being the current MP. As she is proud of letting people know, she lives in an area of council (or ex-council) houses further up the Iffley Road, known as Rose Hill (which borders on the pleasant old villagey part of Iffley). It is in the south-eastern suburb of Cowley where most of Oxford’s heavy industry has been located, the BMW Mini works being a major employer. This factory, originally Morris Motors, later BMC and British Leyland, has long been important to the local economy. On part of the former British Leyland site, Oxford Business Park is located, an example of the new economy replacing the old. Its remit is to be a ‘science and innovation’ cluster, the businesses including Oxford Biomedica, Spy Biotech and Jazz Pharmaceuticals, all of which tie in well with proximity to the University of Oxford’s Medical Sciences Division in Headington, home of the Jenner Institute (where the Astra Zeneca ‘vaccine’ was developed).
That maybe sets into context a recent development, in that the traffic calming measures mentioned above have now been supplemented by a Low-Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) scheme introduced by Oxfordshire County Council, following a consultation with local residents, with the vast majority of those who responded being opposed to it. You could argue that people who are opposed to a new local authority project are more likely to be vociferous in their views than those who support or who are just indifferent. My guess and it is only that, is that the LTN scheme may well be tacitly supported by those (students or otherwise) living in shared rented accommodation and who cannot afford a car, whilst the opposition must be from permanent residents. Perhaps the opposition isn’t just based on the obvious reason that certain residential roads are no longer direct through routes in a motor vehicle, but a fear that it may signal the area becoming one entirely of shared rented (student) accommodation. Not surprisingly, Oxfordshire Green Party supports the LTN's. From her personal website, on a letter that she sent last in March 2022 to the Leader of Oxfordshire County Council, Anneliese Dodds supports the LTN’s in principle, but with the caveat that more money needs to be invested in local public transport. This would include the development of the Cowley branch line, that is used for freight, to also be used for passenger services. It would provide a link from Blackbird Leys and Littlemore to Oxford station and has been a topic of discussion for many years.
From Wild Honey’s website, this is their view of the issue.
East Oxford LTNs - access to Magdalen Road shop:
As a local, independent health food business, we are very much in support of cleaner, safer streets, and fewer cars, and we also understand that some people will need to come to us by car, either due to distance or for a whole range of health-related reasons.
If you need to get to Magdalen Road by car it is still very straightforward. From Cowley Road, you can drive up Magdalen Road and park just by the barrier near the Goldfish Bowl, 50 meters from us. This is also still accessible from Leopold St/St. Mary's Road, where there is plenty of parking. From Iffley Road, access is unchanged and you can still get to us from all of the side streets off Iffley Road. There is also plenty of free parking in the streets surrounding us. Please help spread the word that vehicle access is actually largely unchanged, as the Road Closed signs have been hugely damaging for the whole community there.
We are also in the process of installing bike racks outside the shop, to make it easier for those of you shopping by bike.
However you get here, we very much forward to look forward to welcoming you back soon.
So it appears that the signs are sending out a message of ‘no access’ rather than that access is still possible, but that the County Council have failed to suggest the best routes to reach certain businesses and that the roads themselves are not actually closed but need to be accessed via different routes (in what is still an experimental scheme). Alternatively, it may be that some business owners have hyped up the effect of the LTN, thereby sending out a ‘closed for business’ message to people elsewhere. Could they have done this deliberately in order to get the LTN scrapped? For those reading this who are unfamiliar with Oxford, please note that there are five Park and Ride sites on the periphery of the city, from which frequent bus services operate to the city centre. None of these Park and Ride routes goes along the Cowley or Iffley Roads, but there are frequent bus connections in the city centre that do. It must be said that neither the traffic calming measures nor the LTN are preventing delivery vehicles (and nor should they) as I saw one in Magdalen Road from Essential Trading, a long-established wholefood retailer (run as a workers’ co-operative) based in Bristol.
My own opinion is that I think that Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods are a good idea as long as there are exemptions for disabled drivers and emergency vehicles. So if I lived in that area I’d support the LTN in principle as long as these exemptions are in place, though I dare say that my opinions might well get shouted down. But then, as a vegan, I’m used to my opinions being part of a minority. Fifteen Twenty-seven months ago on a Saturday afternoon in Oxford, I participated in a protest against the totalitarian policy of vaccine passports, where we met at Bonn Square and held a march through Queen Street and Cornmarket Street. The reaction from the shopping public was mostly indifference and in a couple of cases (no doubt fully, at the time, jabbed up) hostility. From the recent opposition to Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods. there is a certain consistency in that it appears that Oxford residents like to pollute their local neighbourhoods, just as they like to pollute their own bodies; and in each case believe that others should be subject to the same toxic chemicals.
Since the 1970’s, most new housing developments have been Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods by default with one main access road feeding a number of cul-de-sacs before the main access road itself becomes a cul-de-sac or maybe loops back upon itself (such as Boundary Brook Road, just off Iffley Road south of Howard Street). So these modern developments are not short-cuts between main roads. As such the streets are generally safer for children playing. I accept however that LTN’s may not be appropriate everywhere. Note that in Oxford, an LTN has now also been introduced in Temple Cowley, which from Magdalen Road is at least three-quarters of a mile away in the direction away from the city centre. This has been introduced to stop people using it as a short-cut between Oxford Road, Cowley (the continuation of the Cowley Road) and Hollow Way, the main road in the direction of Headington. For the LTN’s in both areas, it would probably have been less contentious to make all the relevant streets one-way only for all traffic, with no exemptions for bicycles, lest any motorists think that cyclists are being given preferential treatment. Given the number of parked cars on each side of these roads, the usable road space is in many cases not wide enough for two motor vehicles to pass each other. From some of the opposition voiced on Twitter to the LTN’s it is the appearance of the barriers that is angering some people more than their function, whereas motorists are well-used to one-way streets and no entry signs for any drivers attempting to go contrary to the traffic flow.
A separate traffic management issue that is due to be implemented in Oxford, by the County Council (and to be implemented in Bath and Canterbury amongst other cities), is that of dividing the city into separate permitted-zones for private motor vehicles, between which only a limited number of journeys, currently set at one hundred per year, will be allowed. I disagree with this, although I understand that the reason is to reduce the number of cross-city journeys by requesting in Oxford’s case that residents use the ring-road instead. The problem is that many people’s journeys will become considerably longer (far more so than an LTN may result in) and the Oxford ring-road is already congested at peak times, the western part of it being part of the A34, a long-established important route between the Midlands and a few of the major south-coast ports. People who are opposed to both Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods and the city-wide zoning are deliberately treating them as the same thing, when they are not. But in the tribal world of social media a nuanced distinction between the two isn’t allowed.
Returning to the first paragraph, there is incidentally another Wild Honey shop, under the same ownership, in Little Clarendon Street, between the city centre and Jericho, another area with a high proportion of shared rented Victorian terraced houses, lived in not surprisingly to a large degree by students. If you are walking into town from Magdalen Road en route to Jericho, or as I was, back to the rail station (itself not far from Jericho), then you’ll notice a sign for a Zero Emission Zone, the first such in the country. In principle all streets should be Zero Emission Zones, as we all have the right to breathe in air that is uncontaminated by toxic pollutants, just as we have the right to drink water that is similarly free from toxic pollutants, to consume organic food free from chemical pesticides and to use natural medicines that are free from toxic pharmaceuticals. The agenda behind Zero (and Low) Emission Zones is however a rather dubious ‘green transition’ to electric vehicles, in which the environmental damage takes place upon mining the materials for the batteries; and bear in mind that even if such a battery is charged entirely by renewable sources, there is an environmental cost in their manufacture. Motorists who can’t afford to buy an electric vehicle, but whose journey necessitates travelling along Oxford’s High Street (which is part of the A420) for example, will end up paying a fine, leading to suspicions that perhaps the real agenda is a revenue collection scheme.
It should not be forgotten though that a previous generation of urban planners, elected councillors and unelected council officials alike, encouraged car use, not surprisingly in Oxford, given the economic dependence on the motor industry that it has had for more than a century. Along the south-eastern stretch of the ring-road there is a Sainsbury’s superstore that opened in 1986. In Cowley, on the site of the former Grove Cranes factory, is the more recent development of Templars Shopping Park; and Oxford Business Park in Cowley, as mentioned above, is on a site adjacent to the ring-road. Such out-of-town superstores, retail parks and business parks, all designed to be primarily accessible by car, have been part of a national trend. Most people under the age of about forty have grown up in that car-oriented culture. So when the current generation of elected councillors and unelected council officials, with their new found environmental zeal, adopt superior airs, perhaps they should eat a bit of humble pie on behalf of their predecessors. One particularly infamous proposal more than eighty years ago was for a road through Christ Church Meadow to divert traffic away from the High Street where the Zero Emission Zone has recently been implemented. This excellent article from the Christ Church Cathedral website highlights the difficulties in trying to preserve a historic city centre alongside the increasing traffic growth associated with an industrialising and expanding city.
Whilst ‘climate change’ is invoked as the reason behind the current ‘green transition’ and genuine green measures to encourage people to cycle, walk or use public transport in preference to driving, the bigger picture is resource depletion, in particular that Britain has long-since lost its self-sufficiency in oil. When Britain was self-sufficient in oil during the 1980’s and even a net exporter, the Thatcher government sold the state’s remaining shares in British Petroleum. This, like the privatisations before and afterwards, provided a short-term injection of revenue to be used for tax cuts at the expense of longer-term revenues that could have been invested in the transport infrastructure. Even discounting the geological and environmental damage that would be caused by fracking for shale oil, it can never replace in quantity or quality the Brent Crude from the North Sea; and the energy expended per barrel recovered to extract that shale oil would be greater. So any paranoid rambling you may hear that ‘They don’t want us driving cars’ is missing the point entirely. Where exactly is the fuel going to come from to do so? The obvious answer would be more neo-imperialist wars like ‘Operation Iraqi Liberation’, for which about a million people (myself included) protested against in London exactly twenty-one years ago to the day. (Coincidentally, it was in 2003 that Britain ceased to be self-sufficient in oil). And how was that war and subsequent military actions in the Middle East, Afghanistan and now Ukraine paid for? The taxes have to come from somewhere and fuel duty is the most obvious source.
Further reading
Energy Beyond Oil – Paul Mobbs, Troubador Publishing, Leicester, England, 2005. This is a very informative book on energy resources, albeit now somewhat out of date, written by an environmental campaigner in Banbury, though I don’t share his apocalyptic view of climate change. In Box 28, p152, of the book, he calculated that shifting the majority of car use to public transport wouldn't make enough of an energy saving to overcome the problem of Peak Oil. The problem with that message is that it deters motorists from even considering travelling by public transport instead. Rather, it just sends out a message of do not travel at all, something which for the vast majority of people simply isn’t possible, not least the numerous people who regularly commute by train the twenty-two miles from Banbury to Oxford, because housing costs in Oxford are considerably more expensive.
Some additional information to that which I first published above on WordPress exactly a year ago:
To backtrack, during the summer of 2020 I found out via Twitter that in Oxford a few local anti-lockdown activists ran a stall in Bonn Square every Saturday afternoon, so I drove down one Saturday that September and parked in Botley, west of the A34 and as a consequence outside the city boundary, with no parking restrictions in residential areas. My reason for driving is that I was boycotting public transport due to the mask mandate. At that stage they were the only anti-lockdown activists that I had met in person other than those whom I had met whilst participating in the first anti-lockdown rally, organised by StandUpX, in Birmingham that August. (As mentioned on my blog post about the political left, one of those was someone whom I’d met at anti-war protests and meetings in Coventry back in 2003). I tried to interest the person from StandUpX to whom I spoke about organising a protest in Coventry, but he wasn’t interested. He thought that Oxford would be a good place when I suggested it.
Oxford was and is near enough to keep in touch with anti-lockdown activists, but not really near enough for me to get involved. And it wasn’t until the following March, that again via Twitter, I found out that someone in Coventry had started monthly Free Nation meetings in the War Memorial Park, so I went along to these. I also visited the Oxford anti-lockdown stall again in April 2021 as I found out via Twitter that they were going to hold a small protest march against vaccine passports around the city centre, but unfortunately it didn’t go ahead as not enough people turned up. But the anti-lockdown campaigners were doing a good job there every Saturday in a city that might also be considered nowadays as Wokesford, with a conformist population of academics, students and the ‘laptop class’.
On that April Saturday in Bonn Square there was a ‘Kill the Bill’ protest against the parliamentary bill that would make protests illegal, with a Green Party banner and a fair few of the protestors with muzzles. It amused and disturbed me a bit when a couple of Gen Z female protestors had to put their masks on when walking past me as if I were ‘unclean’. Were they protecting themselves from me, a middle-aged grey-haired male whom they may have considered to be a ‘virus spreader’? Or were they protecting me from them? (I observed the same odd behaviour from a Gen Z male one Sunday whilst I was on an antiganda sticker blitz around bus shelters at Warwick Uni, but I digress …). So was it a wasted journey? Not quite. Those of us who opposed lockdowns also opposed this parliamentary bill, but amongst those protestors against it there was no reciprocal feeling. The Green Party in particular supported lockdowns as it wanted and still does to make working from home the ‘New Normal’; rather than encouraging people to commute by walking, cycling or using public transport the Green Party would prefer that they don’t commute at all.
Having subsequently participated in two protests in London and four in Birmingham against vaccine passports, (possible) vaccine mandates and other aspects of the totalitarian ‘pandemic’ agenda, I decided to make the return trip to Oxford, rather than going into Birmingham again. At that November 2021 protest of only thirty or so people, about half had travelled from elsewhere in Oxfordshire or from (as I did) one of the neighbouring counties, including a few from Reading and two ‘rebels on roundabouts’ from Amersham, who had decided to come to Oxford as a change from London. So I made them aware of where the Jenner Institute is, not far from the route from which they would have travelled in.
As a follow-up to that, in May 2022 in Bonn Square there was a meeting of a similar number of people, some of whom had been at the November protest, about the WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty due to the enacted a few months from now. A disappointingly poor turnout really, but word may not have got around. The meeting was organised by someone from the Chipping Norton ‘Stand in the Park’ group who met every Sunday at the Rollright Stones. I also got talking with people from the Banbury and Bicester ‘Stand in the Park’ groups, there being an overlap between the three groups of people who know (or knew) each other, just as there is/was between the Stratford, Leamington and Coventry groups. The meeting was to listen to a talk given by David Adelman, a lawyer who had driven up from Kent and was due to host a similar meeting that evening at a village hall near Chipping Norton.
A few days after I originally published this blog post in February last year there was a large protest in Oxford against the Low-Traffic Neighbourhood implementation, the dividing of the city into six permitted zones for private motor vehicles as mentioned above and the Zero Emission Zone, the last of which hasn’t made Oxford city centre the traffic-free paradise that could make it a pleasant place to walk around, but at least you no longer experience the dubious pleasure of breathing in diesel fumes from buses like in good old days. The protest was held in Broad Street, for which vehicular access, or not as the case may be, is unclear. As soon as Right Said Fred got involved in the organisation of the protest it was obvious that it would then be aligned with ‘anti-vaxxers’ and the participation of opportunist rogue Laurence Fox just added to that effect.
Odd then that so few people in Oxford are ‘anti-vaxxers’ in the sense of protesting against vaccine passports and vaccine mandates until you realise that it is also Vaxford, where the Astra Zeneca product was developed at the Jenner Institute and a visit to Blackwell’s bookshop in Broad Street gives away the bias in terms of the books on sale. It is a sorry indictment of Oxford and of the freedom activists who turned up from elsewhere for that protest in February last year that they are more concerned about a local traffic management scheme than they are about the fundamental human right of bodily sovereignty! If there is one city (other than London) in the UK which more than any other merits a large protest against the WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty, with its enforcement of vaccine mandates, that city is Oxford for the reason mentioned above.
To get back to the specific area where the Green Routes vegetarian café is, I have visited it a few times since my first visit to the café in late January last year when I took the photos for the blog post as originally published on WordPress a year ago. Most recently, early last month, I travelled down to Oxford by train from Leamington to photograph the effects of the floods. The flooding as it always has been and will be was to the parts of the city to the west and south, the Botley Road and Abingdon Road areas respectively, as well as the large areas of land on those sides of the city which sensibly remain unbuilt on. This in itself, whilst eminently sensible, means that the population living within the city boundary is constrained to within about two thirds of that area (in sharp contrast to Coventry for example, little of which is at flood risk). The flooding on the Abingdon Road meant that the relevant Park and Ride service operated via the Iffley Road, perhaps something that ought to be considered as a permanent change to bring people in to the area where Green Routes is located. My impression of the area is that the effect of the Low-Traffic Neighbourhood implementation on access has been exaggerated. There are no prohibitions on any motor vehicles from using those roads, i.e. they have not been pedestrianised and life is getting on as normal, the claim about ‘divided communities’ being nonsense.
As someone who is a pedestrian, cyclist and motorist in that order – and who uses direct public transport links when available (and there is no sodding mask mandate enforced) – I think that in urban planning, the default should be that pedestrians and wheelchair users have the highest priority. I appreciate that this isn’t always possible, but it should the starting point. Why is it that the right to freedom of movement for pedestrians is treated by the freedom movement as a lower priority than that of motorists? Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods are no more a genuine restriction on freedom of movement than are one-ways streets. And if local residents are concerned about the possibility that there may be the installation of ANPR cameras, have they also opposed these in bus lanes, on speed cameras, with traffic lights and in car parks, council owned or privately owned? It strikes me that the opposition to this Low-Traffic Neighbourhood Zoning is a territorial conflict that local residents and business owners are having with the county council, the same public body that designates most residential areas of the city to be Controlled Parking Zones and which issues parking permits; these benefit local residents who feel territorial about anyone parking outside of their respective homes, which would explain the lack of any street protests against them.
With the likelihood of future ‘pandemic’ lockdowns, it is the proliferation of facial recognition cameras in town/city centres and public parks that will be used to enforce how far people are allowed to walk (or wheel if needing a wheelchair) from home that should concern freedom activists, the facial recognition being linked to those from the passport and driving licence databases. Compared to the proliferation of these facial recognition cameras and the likelihood of vaccine mandates as a result of the WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty that the government has recently signed up to, Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods and other vehicular traffic management issues are trivial. The protests and other activism that I have done against the totalitarian ‘pandemic’ measures had nothing to do with vehicular traffic management issues, so I dislike my views being associated with those of the motoring lobby. I recognise that a car can be a useful amenity, but our entire society should not be geared up on the basis of car-culture, as it has been for several decades. And I still find it bizarre that there are people who protested against being injected with toxic chemicals who are now protesting in favour of urban traffic pollution (as it is equally bizarre that the Green Party supported the toxic ‘vaccination’ agenda). But it’s become apparent to me over the past year and a half that many ‘freedom’ activists, as well as being rabidly anti-vegan, also hate cyclists and anyone else who doesn’t share their drive-thru lifestyles.
The obvious reason for the hostility of motorists towards Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods is that they may represent the start of a long-overdue, in my opinion, change to transport prioritisation in urban areas that for several decades has favoured motor vehicles. And this against a background of competition for road space in a congested environment. It was cheap oil from the Middle East, secured by old fashioned British / Western imperialism, up until 1973 that allowed car ownership to become more widespread. As I’ve put on a previous blog post, the Arab countries’ oil embargo against the USA with its resultant quadrupling of the price of a barrel, should have provided the stimulus for Western countries to reduce their dependence on oil – hence to move away from car-oriented planning – but it didn’t. Britain carried along the same path both in a national context, as had been the case since the Beeching rail cuts of 1963 and an urban context of continuing to plan on the basis of motor vehicles being the default form of transport. So people who have bought into the resultant car-dependent lifestyles are hostile to any change and whilst ‘freedom’ activists might try to convince me that an urban landscape dominated by motor vehicles, with subordination of pedestrians, is a ‘good’ thing, I know that they are wrong.
When I originally published the initial version of this a year ago, tweeted it and re-read it, something obvious jumped out at me as to why so much investment is being put into the biotechnology sector, pharmaceuticals in particular. The intention is to make Brexit Britain the global leader to in order to gain foreign exchange currency, which can be used for the purchase of oil (as well as other commodities for which Britain is import-dependent). This could be an alternative or complement to ‘Operation Iranian Liberation’. So when Sir Kier Pharma, who has promised ‘Blairism on steroids’, has launched a military campaign against Iran to plunder its oil on behalf of British Petroleum (founded as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company), Shell and the rest of Big Oil, with the ‘collateral damage’ that goes with all military campaigns, he can appear benevolent in offering the Iranians some poisonous pharmaceutical ‘vaccines’ in return; what one might call a drugs for oil programme. Expect Anneliese Dodds and her Labour colleagues (including my local MP Matt Western) to offer full support.
Finally, to return to the specific area of Oxford that this blog post is about, one of the most vociferous opponents of the traffic management scheme has been the proprietor of this café on the Cowley Road. He has put it up for sale and may well use the Low-Traffic Neighbourhod barriers in the area as the reason. However, as can be seen, the café is adjacent to a side street that has been blocked off for several years as a permanent measure and the owner of the business has taken advantage of this by using the area outside for seating during the summer. So the blocking off of that side street helped his business!