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

In a city where every scrap of land is sought for much-needed housing, it scarcely seems believable that a 2,000m² site just outside the centre has been sitting derelict for 18 years.

Even more so when that site has a history stretching back 180 years and is located in Jericho, one of the city’s most desirable districts. This is the story of Jericho Wharf, aka Castle Mill Boatyard, whose tattered security hoardings have settled in to become an unwelcome part of the landscape between the picturesque Oxford Canal and the distinctive St Barnabas’ Church.

Eviction

Jericho Wharf had once been a prime unloading location for boats plying the Oxford Canal, bringing coal from the Midlands and produce from rural Oxfordshire into the heart of the city. After WW2, it passed from the Oxford Canal Company to British Waterways, the state-owned body entrusted with the country’s canals.

In the 1960s, British Waterways used it as a base for their holiday hire boats. They then leased it out as a commercial boatyard, repairing and maintaining the craft of the city’s burgeoning boating community. But BW was always short of funds to maintain the canals, and in the 2000s, they began to redevelop or sell off their prime city sites. It was inevitable that Jericho Wharf would be one.

The boating business moved out in 2005, leaving local residential boaters without a place to maintain their craft. With the site sitting empty, they took matters into their own hands, setting up the Jericho Community Boatyard. They admitted they were “squatting”, but felt they had been abandoned.

British Waterways was not sympathetic.

On 31 May 2006, police, bailiffs and security contractors moved onto the site. The boats in the boatyard were craned into the water. Boaters and Jericho residents – including author Philip Pullman, who had featured the boatyard in his Dark Materials series – turned up to protest, but to no avail. The boatyard was evicted and the site ‘secured’.

At the time, expectations were for work to start within two years.

Dereliction

A bewildering array of developers have been associated with the site since then. Bellway Homes. Castlemore. Spring Residential. Cheer Team. Cornerstone Land. SIAHAF. Stories have surfaced on a roughly annual schedule promising that the “deadlock has been broken” and that “work can finally begin”. Work has not, in fact, finally begun.

Both the Jericho and boating communities have high expectations for the site. These include a community centre; boat repair facilities; a turning point for boats; café; a piazza area; and housing. One particularly contentious issue has been the provision of a bridge over the canal, as an alternative to the stepped footbridge onto Canal Street which is inaccessible for wheelchairs and awkward for bikes. The conflicting expectations were such that, at one point, two parallel bridges were proposed – on what is not a massive site.

Planning permission was secured, then abandoned, then applied for again, denied, then secured on appeal in 2023. But locals fear that the current developers, Kidlington-based Cornerstone Land, have lost interest. They say “all contact [with Cornerstone] ceased six months ago”, and the company has “subsequently gone quiet and removed the site from its public portfolio… it seems that the site is being hawked around to yet more speculative developers”.

Action?

The Jericho Wharf Trust has been campaigning since 2012 for the future of the site. In 2013 it even offered £2m to buy the wharf, but was outbid by a Hong Kong-based firm, Cheer Team Corporation. The funding of Cheer Team is unclear, but Anthony Ho Yin Kan was associated with both it and SIAHAF (“Strategic Iconic Assets Heritage Acquisition Fund”) who were to build the development. SIAHAF was funded by “a private Family Office” from Brunei. This June, SIAHAF Management was declared insolvent.

Faced with yet more uncertainty, the Jericho Wharf Trust says “enough is enough”. They are calling on Oxford City Council to compulsorily purchase the site. 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.

As you would expect in a community like Jericho, the Trust is an assertive and knowledgeable group. They have researched the legalities of a CPO (Compulsory Purchase Order) and believe it is eminently suitable, pointing to the city’s Local Plan which identifies the site for development, supportive neighbouring landowners (the Canal & River Trust, successor to British Waterways, and St Barnabas’ Church), and financial viability. Ultimately, they feel, there is no longer any other option.

Patience has run out. Thirty years ago the site was owned by a public corporation. Since then, there have been three landowners, four planning applications by different developers, three planning appeals and two planning permissions; and the developers collectively have ultimatively done nothing. All contact between Cornerstone, the Church and CRT ceased in July 2024. Cornerstone have also ceased communications with the Council and the JWT.

Though council budgets are stretched, the Trust says Oxford City Council has already earmarked £200,000 for the site, which could be used to prepare the CPO. The cost of purchasing the site (now believed to be worth half what Cheer Team paid for it) would be recouped by income from the development, they say. The much debated bridge could be deferred for future funding, and St Barnabas’ Church – a Trust partner whose land is required for site access – would be more likely to agree to a City Council-backed scheme than a purely commercial development. The CPO, say the Trust, could be completed “in 12 to 18 months, and much less if there is a negotiated settlement”.

They have written to city councillors and officers to promote the idea, while launching a petition to demonstrate public support. Compulsory purchase is a nuclear option. But it is hard to disagree with the Trust when they say that 20 years is long enough to wait.