For year’s now I’ve had these idle dreams of how cool it would be if Oxford had trams and metros. I think it goes back to my Hungarian adventures and my love of the M1 metro in Budapest. Ever since then I’ve tried to work out how you could have trams on the Woodstock road, and up Iffley and Cowley roads, and a metro line under the rivers on Abingdon, and Botley roads, and an Ox1 line from Broad Street, under St Giles, up the Banbury Road to Water Eaton where the main city bus terminus would move to. There would be stops at Park Town, and Wolfson, Summertown, Squitchley Circus etc…
Today as I cycled in, imagining how Banbury Road would look without buses, and grossely less traffic with commuters taken into town via trains just beneath the road, spilling out onto the street periodically from graceful stone underground stations, it occurred to me that my dream of Oxford could be realised, if only in the pages of my novel in its alter-ego of Wren Hoe. I quite like the prospect of having this extra way for Louis Tumnal to get about town, and as a possible location to meet up/part with friends; and it sets the fictional town appart from the real city.
