Light years away

When Pizza Hut was told it could not put up a neon-lit frontage in Oxford High Street, it complained that the city council was putting “gown before town” by robbing a rather dull area of “colour and interest”. Here the poor old pizzeria seems to have fallen rather heavily off its pons asinorum. Visitors don’t come to Oxford to see neon signs but to look at the buildings. The High Street is perhaps the most beautiful street in the world. If it isn’t, name another. The town is demanding protection from neon. Gown isn’t the enemy now as it was on St Scholastica’s Day 1355, when 62 scholars were killed in riots that started two minutes’ walk from Pizza Hut. That was at Carfax, where a Norman church stood until it was demolished in 1896 – to let traffic flow more freely. That sounds shocking now. But so does neon.