WITH its rose-covered front door and Cotswold stone walls, an Oxford academic’s 18thcentury cottage was considered pretty enough to feature in the TV series Inspector Morse.

Programme-makers saw nothing amiss despite the fact that Professor Alison Brading, who spends most of her time in a wheelchair because of polio, had replaced her heavy wooden front door with an authentic-looking uPVC one, which was easier for her to open.

Yesterday, however, she was fined £330 by magistrates and ordered to pay £1,797 costs for breaching conservation laws by not having planning permission to alter the appearance of her Grade II listed home.

But after four years of battling, Professor Brading, a professor of pharmacology and tutor in physiology at Lady Margaret Hall, was not prepared to give in and declared that she would rather go to prison than pay up. She told Bicester magistrates that the old wooden door to her cottage in the beautiful village of Thrupp, Oxfordshire, was difficult to open, and that she often suffered the humiliation of having to telephone her neighbours to let her out.

When her builder recommended a uPVC door of similar appearance, she did not realise that she needed planning permission. Professor Brading, 66, told the court that she cherished her independence: “I tried hard to find a door that did not look too different. I have lived on my own in this house since 1970 and I have had to make quite a lot of changes so that I can continue to live on my own.”

She added that it would cost her £3,000 to replace the plastic door with a timber one and she would not know whether she would be able to open it until after it was fitted.

She said: “It’s a risk I’m not really prepared to take because I do really want to stay living on my own. I’m sure both I and the council have better ways of spending this money.”

Cherwell District Council first raised the matter with her in 2001 and she failed to get retrospective planning permission. A government planning inspector dismissed Professor Brading’s appeal on the basis that the door was “an alien feature”. In September 2003 Professor Brading was fined £50 and ordered to pay £50 costs for breaching an order. When she refused to change the door, another summons followed.

After the hearing, Professor Brading said: “I think it’s ridiculous. Nobody has objected to it and I have a lot of support from friends and neighbours.”

Asked how far she would go, she insisted: “I would go to jail. It might be an interesting experience.”

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