The Oxford pub in Kentish Town

• THE Oxford pub on the corner of Islip Street and Kentish Town Road is currently shut because it has been sold to a company who already own the Jazz Café in Camden Town.

It is supposedly reopening in the new year with a new name, The Parakeet. I had thought that the fashion for giving silly new names to pubs with long-established, historic ones was mercifully over.

The pub is called The Oxford because the land on which it is built belonged for centuries to Oxford’s oldest college, as all the street names round there suggest.

For a few years, not long ago, it got renamed after someone’s mother or girl-friend, but then mercifully reverted to The Oxford, as it had continued to be known anyway.

Kentish Town, of course, historically a much older and more interesting district than Camden Town, should not have to go through this nonsense again.

GILLIAN TINDALL, NW5