The Senior Bursar of Magdalen College pulled his car up at the southern edge of Oxford and looked into the distance. "That's all Green Belt land," he assured me. "It's a ragged edge to the city. We would want to create a far more clearly defined southern boundary - then say 'here and no further'."
What lay in front of us were 320 acres of land that Magdalen College, Thames Water and Oxford City Council want to cover with a new settlement of 3,000 homes.
It is a site that over the coming months and years is destined to become an increasingly fierce battleground, with the lines already being drawn up and the main protagonists busily casting around for allies. On the one side are the Oxford expansionists: Oxford City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, Magdalen College and, we may assume, much of Oxford University; on the other: South Oxfordshire District Council, within whose boundary the site lies, the Vale of the White Horse District Council, Oxford Preservation Trust and the surrounding parishes.
But essentially this is a battle between those who believe that the city's economic future and well-being is dependent on the building of thousands of homes, and those who believe that Oxford's Green Belt must be protected to stop Oxford's urban sprawl spilling out to Kidlington, Abingdon, Sandford and beyond.
Mr Young is a patient strategist, who knows Magdalen have chosen their ground well. For the land south of Grenoble Road, stretching from Greater Leys to Sandford, is not by any stretch of the imagination the most beautiful section of Green Belt land - at least not the section that he was now inviting me to inspect.
The ordinary-looking farmland is dissected by a row of electricity pylons, with the only significant area of trees grown to hide from view an electricity sub-station. The site is home to Oxford's main sewage treatment works, while a short distance to the west there is a mobile home park. The land is skirted on the Oxford side by a new road that runs past Oxford United's Kassam Stadium and the Oxford Science Park, a road full of roundabouts that tellingly look incomplete - they only have two exits. There are no turn-offs to the south, at least not yet.
For there can be no doubting that much of the infrastructure is now conveniently in place and, until last week, Magdalen was in the happy position of being able to leave it to others to make the case for a new settlement. That was until it suffered an early defeat at the hands of the Green Belt lobby. For the decision by Oxfordshire County Council's executive to remove the Grenoble Road site from the draft Structure Plan - the planning blueprint for the county up until 2016 - stung the college into spelling out just what it believes is now at stake.
The college confirmed that what it has in mind is a full-blown settlement - with 3,000 homes, not 1,000 as originally thought. There would be shops, two schools, GP and dentist surgeries, an access road and a park-and-ride to relieve pressure on Redbridge. Not only that, but the three-phase scheme would also allow the Oxford Science Park to almost double in size by relocating the sewage treatment works to a site east of Sandfordbrake Farm.
Reducing the issue to the Green Belt versus housing is to ignore the wider implications for the city's economic future, argues the college. Magdalen is now more than ready to link the growth and employment opportunities of Oxford Science Park with the demand for homes, even raising the spectre of business being lost to Cambridge. Mr Young said: "Oxford Science Park is the only employment location in the county that has been specifically identified to serve the needs of knowledge-based business. But it is reaching its capacity. If there is not room to expand, businesses will look to other locations. In this respect, the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge Arc creates alternatives to Oxford. Plans are in place to review the Green Belt at Cambridge and Milton Keynes."
If you want to extend Oxford, provide thousands of affordable, high-quality homes, integrated with the rest of the city and allow the science park to grow, then 'we can deliver' is the clear message coming out of Magdalen. The alternative, he said, was to build more homes in Grove, reverting back to the market town strategy that will only further clog up the county's roads.
On Tuesday, Oxfordshire county councillors will again consider whether the plan should be included in the draft Structure Plan at a meeting of the full council. In June, county councillor Charles Shouler, anxious to stop controversial plans for 1,000 homes being built in Bicester, had persuaded county councillors to vote 37-22 to allow "an urban extension of Oxford" beyond the Ring Road.
But the plan generated 1,900 objections, about 75 per cent of all the objections received about the Structure Plan during the consultation period, and this was to prove decisive.
Earlier this month, the county council's executive duly voted to drop the scheme from the draft Structure Plan, proposing instead to build 400 extra houses in the Vale of White Horse, 300 in Witney, 200 in Oxford and a 100 in Bicester.
\ The vote produced a blistering attack from Oxfordshire Chamber of Commerce, whose president, Keith Slater, said: "With house prices continuing to rise in the county and the shortage of affordable and other homes as acute as ever, we stand by our view that Oxford is the best option for housing. The vote is also a blow to those, like the Chamber, who have argued that control of such issues must remain local and not be handed to regional bodies in Guildford or anywhere. If the county council shows it cannot be trusted to make tough strategic decisions, the case for it retaining control of the Structure Plan process is hard to argue."
County council leader Keith Mitchell predicted there would no more U-turns at Tuesday's meeting, while at the same time making clear his belief that the Grenoble Road site had "a lot of merit" and was "a natural extension of the city". He said: "Grenoble Road is going to come back. I think members have made up their mind this time. The problem was in the way the process happened. It arrived late, there was no proper consultation and councillors felt they were being bounced into a decision. I suspect that we will have to look at the whole of the Green Belt and there may have to be some give and take."
The leader's words will bring little comfort to those who say that the development would lead to the "shredding" of the whole Green Belt. Debbie Dance, the Preservation Trust's secretary, has repeatedly warned: "Once you have breached the Green Belt in one place, it will be a free-for-all."
Ian Scargill, chairman of the Oxford Green Belt Network, believes approval of the scheme would make it impossible to turn other developers down, as more landowners, including many Oxford colleges, see enormous windfall gains from selling land at inflated prices.
John Howell, Conservative county councillor for Dorchester, insists it would now be wrong to rush to any decision: "What is required is a mature discussion about the Green Belt outside the time-frame of the Structure Plan. To allow people to eat away at the Green Belt would be a great mistake. It is hardly a public relations triumph for Magdalen to come up with 3,000 houses when 1,000 caused such antagonism. Where you have the Green Belt against the city, of course it is not as pretty as parts of the Green Belt further away. Magdalen does not seem to be interested in making new friends. They need to go out and talk to the public."
Elizabeth Gillespie, a member of Baldon Parish Council and executive co-ordinator of ORANGE (Oxfordshire Residents Against New Green Belt Exploitation) accused the college of only being interested in lobbying "the great and the good". She said: "There has been no consultation of local residents and there seems to be little to back up the assertion that this scheme is required to safeguard the future of the science park. The area proposed for the development is not the low-grade urban fringe described. It currently still produces at seven tonnes per hectare. So far there has been no archaeology and ecology work done in the area. Local people are having to pay for this work to be done over the next few months out of their own pockets."
Whatever decision is reached on Tuesday, the issue is certain to go before a formal examination in public later in the year. Yet this too may prove irrelevant as the draft county Structure Plan itself, if, as expected, Government legislation now before Parliament shortly hands County Hall's planning powers to the South East England Regional Assembly. Then there is the question of what John Prescott wants.
The publication of the Treasury-sponsored Barker Report on housing needs would appear to suggest that Magdalen and Oxford City Council are swimming with the Government tide. With 6,000 people on the city council's housing register, one in 20 of Oxford's children now living in accommodation for the homeless and the highest house prices outside London, Oxford would seem to have the kind of chronic housing shortage that Barker seeks to address. In what is set to be a long and bitter struggle, Tuesday's council meeting is a skirmish that Magdalen can well afford to lose.
reg.little@nqo.com