Save Jericho Wharf.

Posted December 03 2024

Enough is enough. After 20 wasted years of developer greed and incompetence, the JWT has asked the City Council to step in and secure the Jericho Wharf site for Oxford. A compulsory purchase order can be followed by a matching sale to a chosen developer who will commit to deliver a boatyard, a community centre, and a public square along with much needed housing.

Please sign our petition at www.change.org/jerichowharf

The faded and tattered banners alongside the canal in Jericho are a shameful testimony to planning failure. The opportunity presented by one of the city’s most iconic locations has been squandered by a sequence of speculative developers. SIAHAF, whose name adorns the fading billboards, has been put into compulsory liquidation by Court Order, following a petition from His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. And the current developer, Cornerstone Land, which received planning permission in 2022, has subsequently gone quiet and removed the site from its public portfolio. Now it seems that the site is being hawked around to yet more speculative developers, and so the cycle is at high risk of further repeats.

These delays have been deeply damaging. As the weeds have flourished in Jericho, boats have been sinking along the Oxford Canal and hundreds of others are at risk of serious deterioration, deprived of the working boatyard that can help keep them afloat – and threatening one of Oxford’s most affordable forms of housing. At the same time, the Jericho Community Centre, a valiant but vulnerable Victorian building, has been creaking and crumbling, depriving Jericho residents of the 21^st Century facilities they deserve and leaving many disabled users out in the cold.

JWT Chair Phyllis Starkey says: “After 20 years, the Jericho Canalside site remains derelict, and the City Council and the community continue to be held to ransom. Without Council intervention we shall see even more speculative planning applications. It is time to bring this dismal cycle to a decisive stop.”

The Jericho Wharf Trust is therefore calling on Oxford City Council to make a compulsory purchase order (CPO) for the site. This request might seem quixotic when the Council's finances are tight. But as the JWT demonstrates in its letter to councillors, this is entirely  feasible financially – as well as bringing to an end the steady drain on City budgets caused by speculative planning applications, refusals and appeals.  

The Wharf site is currently owned by the Hong Kong-based Cheer Team Corporation which in 2013 bought it for £2.6 million – outbidding the more realistic £2.0 million offered by the Jericho Wharf Trust. Developers have pleaded that the site is financially unviable – not least because they overpaid for the land. In 2022, the Government Planning Inspectorate concluded that the current value of the land was just £1 million. 

The City should now buy the site for current market value,  and make a back-to-back arrangement with a selected developer who will commit to build urgently needed housing as well as delivering what the community needs - implementing architects Howarth Tompkins scheme which was approved nearly a decade ago.

30 years ago the Jericho Wharf site was owned by what is now the Canal and Rivers Trust, a public corporation which leased the land to a working boatyard. Time to again exert public control over this critical site, in the interests of Oxford and of Jericho and its surrounding communities.

For a Q&A on the proposed CPO, please CLICK HERE

Please urge your City councillors to  support a compulsory purchase:
Carfax and Jericho
cllrahollingsworth@oxford.gov.uk
cllrldiggins@oxford.gov.uk
Walton Manor
cllrjfry@oxford.gov.uk
cllrlupton@oxford.gov.uk
Please sign our petition at www.change.org/jerichowharf

Media coverage of the campaign

BBC
Why do residents want to save a derelict wharf?

Oxford Clarion
“Enough is enough”: Jericho community loses patience with wharf saga

Oxford Mail
Developer 'abandons' Jericho piazza redevelopment plans