Dear friends, 

Great news! Your ongoing support for the campaign has borne serious fruit as it was announced last week that the construction company lined up to build the bridge, Balfour Beatty, have pulled out. 

Balfour Beatty are one of the world’s most notorious building corporations: they were recently fined $49million for fraud, their neglect of safety requirements led to the death and serious injury of two workers in Britain in 2020, and significant defects in their building work resulted in the evacuation of student accommodation in Bethnal Green at an alleged cost of £34million. 

The City Council have been tight-lipped on why the company pulled out, but the news comes on the back of Hands Off Grandpont Nature Park addresses to both the Council Cabinet and full Council raising the company’s scandalous track record and demanding answers as to why such an unethical and incompetent company was ever contracted in the first place. 

The Council’s plans are now in disarray: they have less than a month to find an additional £3.7million of funding for the bridge and find a new contractor to deliver it if they are to stay on schedule to begin work in the spring as planned. 

NOW IS THE TIME TO STOP THE MADNESS!

The tide is definitely turning against the bridge: Labour councillors no longer raise the issue on social media and in their local newsletters (presumably seeing it is a toxic vote loser), and even the Lib Dems - who, as leaders of the County Council, helped fund the bridge, and who in planning committee helped to push it through - have now turned against it. 

Please join other lovers of the Nature Park and join forces to put a stop to this foolishness once and for all! 

Soup and social! 

Sunday 1st February 2026 4-6pm

St Ebbe’s School 

Come and warm your cockles with delicious homemade soup and meet other residents concerned about the Council’s plans for the Nature Park. 

• Join us on the next phase of the campaign for the last crucial stretch.

• Hear an update on the campaign

• Add your weight to make politicians, media – and the whole community – sit up and take notice

Collectively we can make a difference! 

Judicial review update 

Thanks to the incredible generosity and determination of local residents, a pitched legal battle was fought out in the High Court in February, following which, sadly, the Court upheld the Council’s decision to grant planning permission. 

• The judge’s ruling, however, completely ignored the two strongest arguments: 

a) that the planning committee was misled by planning officers’ false claims that the Grandpont Nature Park is located in an ‘area of change’ democratically designated for development in the Local Plan, when in fact it is designated as Green infrastructure to be protected against development; and 

b) that the bridge project has always been presented as an integral part of the new floodproof connection from Osney Mead to Oxpens required by the Local Plan, and an Environmental Impact Assessment screening should therefore have been conducted on that entire connection rather than on the bridge alone. 

• An appeal was therefore lodged against the High Court’s decision, but this was dismissed in August, with the ruling again ignoring these two crucial points, stating simply that “the judge was entitled to reach the conclusion he did for the reasons he gave.” 

• Yet the moral arguments for rethinking the project are growing by the day: 

  • Residents continue to oppose the plan in their thousands

  • The prospects of actually building a new University Innovation Park on the floodplain at Osney Mead (serving which is the sole intended purpose of the bridge) are becoming increasingly remote as flooding worsens and the local sewage system continues to buckle 

  • The costs of the bridge are growing fast at a time when public money is desperately needed elsewhere. 

Now is the time to put the final nail in the coffin of this disastrous plan. 

The real power lies where it always has - not with the courts, but with the people!

What can you offer to support a precious local cause? 

If wilful damage to local, loved woodland infuriates you and you want to stop it, there is still time and opportunity - but it needs you! 

Your presence and support alone are welcome; if you can offer more, there’s work to be done together: 

• If you have 1 minute: sign the petition at savegnp.org 

• If you have 5 minutes: forward the petition to your friends, neighbours and neighbourhood groupchats with a personal note 

• If you have 30 minutes: write a letter voicing your concerns, and send it to your local councillors, MP and the local press  (and copy to [email protected])  - you can find all the information you might need at savegnp.org 

• If you have a couple of hours: bring your skills and energy to the campaign! There is plenty to do, whether it's helping with events, leafleting, campaign planning, updating the website, graphics, videomaking, photography, writing, cooking, music or any other ideas you might have -  email [email protected] and let’s link up! 

For more updates, see savegnp.org 

Contact [email protected]

HANDS OFF GRANDPONT NATURE PARK! 

Wednesday 13th August, 5.15pm - Outside Oxford town hall 

Protest against Oxford City Council’s plans to allocate £14million of public money - the bulk of it taken from funds which are supposed to facilitate affordable housing - to destroy woodland for a pointless new bridge 

The City Council plans to commit an incredible £14million of public money to build the third cycle and pedestrian bridge in a quarter of a mile stretch of the river, wrecking the only woodland on the main path through Grandpont Nature Park in the process. This woodland is fundamental to the health and wellbeing of the roughly 1000 people per day who use it. The only justification for this ecological vandalism and blatant misuse of public funds is that the bridge is needed to serve Oxford University’s planned new private commercial development at Osney Mead, which requires a new floodproof connection in order to go ahead. Yet the bridge does not provide this connection, as it does not link to Osney Mead at all, and provides no means of floodproofing the path between Osney Mead and the new bridge. It is a total white elephant which singularly fails to meet its own basic purpose.

But ordinary people have other ideas! Your campaign to demand the Council think again is making great gains. Already, united action by local residents has saved the woodland for two summers and counting, kept the issue alive in the local press and raised huge public awareness of the iniquities of the scheme. The Council are clearly on the backfoot over their plans, increasingly unable to even articulate any kind of justification for the plan when confronted with its gaping logical, moral and financial holes, other than crowing about their pyrrhic victory at the planning court. Now is the time to build on the momentum and push for an end to this pointless and ill-thought out waste of public funds and biodiversity. 

A big turnout on the 13th will show the Council that there are political consequences for riding roughshod over local people’s concerns and local ecology.  If you and other local residents are willing to stand together to defend this precious natural asset - you can win! 

All welcome! Bring all your friends!

Followed by Friends of Grandpont Nature Park social nearby with food and drink!! 

See our recent interview on That's TV about the problems with the bridge - and the City Council's response... https://sites.google.com/view/savegnp/press?authuser=0

On 10th March, we learned that we had lost our JR.

We were bemused, to say the least. The reasons given were at times peripheral to the main argument, occasionally illogical (the understanding of the word 'necessarily' was deemed extremely important in one argument, but 'integral to' didn't have to mean 'key-to' or 'unlocking' in another) and altogether hard to reason.

We have applied to appeal (deadline 31st March. Skeleton arguments submitted by 14th April) and await the outcome of that request.

Help us raise the final  payments to our solicitors and watch this space for news of what's next. The good fight continues!

A number of us attended the JR at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, on 4th and 5th Feb. 

The nail-biting hearing lasted the entire two days - the judge, we understand, was very lenient - and we now await the outcome. This, we were told, will be in a minimum of three weeks and a maximum of 3 months.

We're really close now to our fundraising target! If you can afford a bit more and/or haven't yet forwarded this to friends, please do so.

 And watch this space - or our website savegnp.org - for the outcome!

Thank you!

The Judicial Review of Oxford City Council's planning decision to build the Oxpens River Bridge is on Tuesday 4th and Wednesday 5th February.

The remaining funding we are looking to raise is for our next stage of legal input, up to and through the JR (plus £10,000 court costs - if we lose).

Help us continue our pursuit of justice by donating to the cause!  And please share this with anyone you know who might help.

Thank you!

On Thursday 3rd October we received notification from our solicitors that our JR will be going ahead!

All five of our 'Grounds for requesting JR' were accepted by the court and they are allocating one and a half days (as opposed to the usual one) to the hearing, sometime in the next few months, soon to be determined.

So our determination that genuine democratic process by Oxford City Council be adhered to has been vindicated and our campaign continues.

Please help us to raise the funds we need to succeed in our quest!

Thank you!

Thanks to you, we have now covered the fees necessary to submit our judicial review claim! 

The next stage is called the permission stage, where the Court will decide whether there is enough of a case to warrant the judicial review actually going forward to a hearing. If not, we will appeal this decision. Either way, further funds will be needed to fund the necessary legal fees for what follows. Our £35,000 stretch target is, we believe, the maximum needed to cover all possible eventualities. 

We thank you for your ongoing support! 

We'll be in touch again if the JR gets the go-ahead.

Thank you all for donating - we are now two-thirds of the way to our target, but with only five days to go, we need a big push! 

If we don't reach the £10,000 target by 10am on the morning of Saturday 28th September, we don't get any of it. We think we have a really good case to challenge the legality of the project (details at savegnp.org) but we do need to raise the legal fees to take it forward. 

It is known that personal communication makes all the difference - that's we are asking those who have donated already to contact three (or more!) people (friends, family members, colleagues) who might be willing to donate. 

We have made a video specifically showing the woodland that will be destroyed by the bridge and  the new path (above). The extent of damage is so large because the plan is to create a completely new, 4.5 metre wide, path (more like a road really) through what is currently the top of the south side of the woodland, meaning that whole section of woodland would be lost. This is the only wooded section of the main path through the Nature Park, and is a staple of the daily walk/ commute of hundreds of people as well as being a haven for all kinds of birds and wildlife. 

Please do let your friends and family know what is at stake :-)