Oxford Preservation Trust

The Trust seeks to enhance Oxford by encouraging thoughtful development and new design, while protecting historic buildings and green open spaces.

It employs six staff including its Chief Executive Officer, Anna Eavis The Trust runs Oxford Open Doors annually, as well as the OPT Awards (to encourage the best new buildings, conservation projects, landscaping and temporary projects), and it is a member of the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board.

The Trust's notable projects have included the successful conversion in the early 1990s of St George's Tower on the Oxford Castle site into a popular tourist attraction.

To this end it owns several pieces of land at Boars Hill and elsewhere around Oxford such as Jarn Mound.

In 2007[2] and 2008[3] the Trust successfully opposed the Bodleian Library's proposal to build a new book depository that would have obstructed a view from Boar's Hill of Oxford's skyline that the poet Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) called the city's "dreaming spires".