Oxford Green Belt Network

Oxford Green Belt Our Mission is to Preserve and Protect the whole of the Oxford Green Belt Green Belt Network
- for the benefit of all who treasure our beautiful City and for all who live
in the Green Belt and beyond.

News Update 23 March 2020

The Green Belt provides a safe place for exercise as the Covid-19 pandemic reaches Oxford
The essential restrictions to slow the spread of this coronavirus throughout Oxfordshire have ensured that none of the large meetings crucial to Oxfordshire's future development can take place for some months. This places into limbo all the decisions about the allocation of strategic sites for housing and the promised public consultation on the route for the proposed Oxford-Cambridge Expressway. However, this emergency also brings into focus the value of the Oxford Green Belt as a vital amenity to be maintained in the future for public health. For more details, please read the OGBN Newsletter for March 2020 which is here.

CPRE : Space to Breathe:
Providing space to unwind, engage with nature - and also grow our food - the Green Belt is the countryside next door for 30 million people in some of our largest and most historic cities. The urgent need to help us address the climate emergency and give people more opportunity to engage with nature means that our Green Belts have never been more important.
Yet this space is under threat like never before: from the impacts of climate breakdown to development in the countryside. CPRE, the countryside charity has published regular reports detailing development proposals on the Green Belt since 2012. This report highlights the unprecedented proposals for building housing in the Green Belt, squandering this valuable asset at a time where it is needed for our own health and wellbeing, and to address the climate emergency, more than ever before.

CPRE: Space to Breathe: A State of the Green Belt report - Publication date: October 2019

For Oxford Green Belt Network's responses to consultations on the Local Plans of Cherwell, Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire District Councils, see the menu opposite under Planning Consultations.

The Oxford Green Belt Network continues to fight any suggestion that Green Belt policy be weakened in an attempt to stimulate the national economy. A city's Green Belt setting, like that of Oxford, encourages economic growth rather than preventing it.

The Oxford Green Belt Network was established in 1997 to:

Protect the setting of the Historic City of Oxford from the urban sprawl which had damaged so many other cities (though none as beautiful as ours).

Protect the individual towns and villages around Oxford from being swallowed up into an expanding City and allowing them to retain their cherished separate identities.

Preserve open countryside close at hand as a green lung for the health and enjoyment of City dwellers.

The clamour of developers against the Green Belt is stronger now than it has ever been.

The creators of the Green Belt foresaw this and said that the essence of the Green Belt is its permanence
- that is what we fight to ensure.

If you need help with a threat to the Green Belt where you live; or would like more information about what we do;
or would like to help us in our work - contact us by e-mail at webmaster@oxfordgreenbelt.net