Meanwhile, battle raged over its future. Would the rundown Clarry reopen or be pulled down? And would Morris Garages which occupied the site behind - formerly stables for the horses which pulled the stagecoaches - be forced to move? Oxford City Council refused planning permission to build a Woolworth store on the site because, it said, the city needed hotel rooms. But opponents argued at a three-day public inquiry in 1952 that the building was so rundown that it was economically impossible to turn it into a modern hotel. The Minister of Housing and Local Government, Harold Macmillan, later Prime Minister, ruled in Woolworth’s favour, a decision described as a disaster for Oxford by the mayor, Mr A B Brown.