Media coverage

JERICHO WHARF MEDIA COVERAGE ITEM

The community deserves the best for Jericho boatyard site

Oxford Times December 4, 2025 writer Oxford Times

The plight of the more than 400 boaters who call the city centre section of the Oxford Canal home is reason enough to get a working boatyard back on the historic site at Jericho Wharf.

Beyond that, the demonstrable need for a fit- for-purpose, accessible community centre and public space for people in Jericho makes the argument convincing.

And local people’s pleas to build something Oxford can be proud of next door to the ‘Jericho Basilica’ of St Barnabas Church, proves the logic behind the fight.

In the 33 years since the old boatyard – home to Orchard Cruisers – shut down, Jericho Wharf has become a battleground between community interest and the cynical investment and speculative development which blights modern Oxford.

That battle didn’t even begin with the current unflinching landowner.

The most recent bid from Cheer Team Corporation, which bought the site in 2013 to replace the hard-earned compromise of a blended community and profit-driven development with 230 student flats, has been described as cynical, made worse by the company’s total lack of engagement with the locals on the ground and the boaters on the canal.

But before that, the canalside community struggled under the site’s ownership by British Waterways, which similarly saw several lapsed or rejected planning applications for the site pass through its machine.

Ever pragmatic, the locals in Jericho, championed by the Jericho Wharf Trust, emphasise that they too want whatever is eventually built to make money, through profitable housing.

But they and the city’s planning authority have been emphatically and admirably uncompromising on the requirement that any new development must cater to the community’s need for a boatyard, community centre and public space.

In the last 20 years of the wharf’s (at least) 170-year history, campaigners have successfully made themselves a stone in the shoe of an apparently pitiless landowner who, given free reign, would have bulldozed the crumbling remains of the boatyard site in favour of sleek new builds.

Over time, Jericho Wharf has become representative of the struggle between the city’s heritage and its progress, and how the two might fit together.

It is as integral to the 200-year-old suburb as any other building or structure in the storied neighbourhood.

With support only growing for the Jericho Wharf Trust’s appeal, campaigners remaining doggedly committed to the fight and the landowner stubbornly stagnant, it can only be a matter of time before the city reclaims this piece of its heritage.

When it does, it will be thanks to the remarkable persistence of a group of volunteers and heritage champions who are determined to preserve the best of Oxford’s past.

Text reproduced by kind permission of the Oxford Times