Barbecues, fires, fireworks and sky lanterns are banned in 42 Oxford parks from Friday 4 September, on pain of a £100 fine. Here is the full list.

Lighting a barbecue in Port Meadow, South Park, Hinksey Park or Cutteslowe Park becomes a £100 offence from Friday 4 September.

Oxford City Council announced on Thursday morning that it had extended its Public Spaces Protection Order to reduce wildfire risk. The press release did not say when the order starts, or name a single park it covers.

Both are in the paperwork. The order was signed on 1 September by Tom Hook, the council’s Deputy Chief Executive for City and Citizens’ Services, as an urgent officer decision. It comes into force on Friday and runs for three years.

What is banned, and where

The order itself is made under section 59 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. In the listed places, at any time of day or night, you are in breach if you:

  • create, prepare, light, control or take part in a fire or barbecue that is not inside a marked designated area
  • light a firework, or “any other thing likely to cause a fire”
  • release a lighted sky lantern

There is a defence of reasonable excuse. The penalty is a £100 fixed penalty notice. Refuse to pay, or cause serious damage, and the council can prosecute: the offence carries a fine of up to level 3 on the standard scale, which the council puts at up to £1,000, plus court costs and possible compensation for criminal damage.

The order only bites in the places its schedule names. These are the 42 entries it lists, in alphabetical order, spelled as the order spells them:

  • Angel and Greyhound Meadow
  • Barracks Lane Meadow
  • Botley Park and Tumbling Bay
  • Brasenose Woods Open Space
  • Burgess Field Nature Park
  • Bury Knowle Park
  • Cold Harbour Nature Area
  • Court Place Farm Open Space
  • Cowley Marsh Park
  • Cutteslowe Park
  • Dean’s Ham Meadow
  • Dunstan Road Park and Nature Area
  • Fiddler’s Island
  • Florence Park
  • Fry’s Hill Park
  • Grandpont Nature Park
  • Grandpont Open Space, Whitehouse Rd Grandpont Rec
  • Headington Hill Park
  • Hinksey Park
  • Iffley Meadows Nature Reserve
  • Kidneys Nature Area
  • King George’s Field
  • Longbridges Thameside Nature Area and Island
  • Lye Valley Nature Reserve
  • Magdalen Quarry Nature Area
  • Magdalen Wood West Open Space
  • Meadow Lane South Nature Park
  • New Marston Recreation Ground
  • Peasmore Piece Nature Area
  • Port Meadow
  • Rivermead Rd Nature Area
  • Rock Edge Nature Reserve
  • Seacourt Nature Area
  • Showman’s Field, Marston
  • South Park
  • Spindleberry Nature Area
  • Sunnymead Meadow
  • Sunnymead Open Space
  • Trap Grounds Nature Reserve
  • Walton Well Rd Open Space
  • Woodhouse Way Nature Area, Iffley
  • Wolvercote Hurst Woodland Fragment

Shotover Country Park is not on that list. The council manages its 117 hectares and it has its own separate byelaws, though Brasenose Woods, which the council’s venue directory records as part of Shotover, is covered by the new order.

Three different totals in the council’s own papers

How many places are actually covered depends on which council document you read.

  • The published decision says the order addresses fire risk “in 41 parks and open spaces”
  • The schedule attached to the order prints 42 separate entries, though one of them (“Grandpont Open Space, Whitehouse Rd Grandpont Rec”) appears to name more than one space
  • The Monitoring Officer’s notification to the Chair of the Scrutiny Committee says 44 parks and open spaces, “in 20 of the 24 city wards”

Nothing turns on the discrepancy legally, because the schedule is the order and the schedule is what an enforcement officer works from. But if you are trying to work out whether your local green space is covered, the list above is the one that counts.

Why it was done without the usual notice

This was a key decision taken as an urgent one, which means it skipped the normal 28 days on the council’s forward plan. It also skipped call-in, the process that lets four councillors or the Scrutiny chair pause an executive decision.

Emma Jackman, the council’s Director of Law, Governance and Strategy, wrote to Councillor Alex Powell, Chair of the Scrutiny Committee, on 25 August asking him to waive call-in. He agreed the same afternoon, replying that “having seen the volume of wildfires across the UK in recent weeks, the taking of such action in the face of another heatwave strikes as a very clear example of urgency”.

There was no public consultation on the order. Councillors for every affected ward were written to on 25 August, and the Police and Crime Commissioner and the Oxfordshire Chief Superintendent were consulted as the statutory consultees the Act requires. The decision will be reported back to Cabinet and to full Council.

The council spent two years trying to do this another way

The same letter contains the part of the story the press release left out entirely. Oxford tried to deal with fires in its parks through byelaws, not a PSPO, and was blocked.

The council consulted on new parks and open spaces byelaws from 12 February to 8 April 2024. It got 523 responses, 60% of them supporting the updated byelaws in general, and full council approved an application to the Secretary of State.

“Whilst officers have attempted to have the bylaws approved, on the third submission to the Secretary of State we were informed we were unable to use the bylaws to deal with this as it must be by PSPO,” Jackman wrote. Getting a fresh byelaw approved, the decision papers add, “would take too long”.

Meanwhile the government has acted on the retail end. On 14 August it issued statutory guidelines under the General Product Safety Regulations saying disposable barbecues “cannot be considered a safe product in the context of the ongoing weather and environmental conditions, and must not be made available for sale either in store or online at the current time”. That guidance is temporary and covers England, Scotland and Wales.

How Oxford got here

Timeline showing Oxford City Council's route to the 2026 parks fire ban: a byelaw consultation from February to April 2024 with 523 responses and 60 per cent support, three rejected submissions to the Secretary of State, government guidance stopping disposable barbecue sales on 14 August 2026, call-in waived on 25 August, the order made on 1 September, in force 4 September 2026 and expiring 4 September 2029
Two years of byelaw attempts, then a nine-day dash to a three-year order. Graphic by The Oxford Post, from the council's decision papers and the byelaws consultation page

Oxford has been here before. A Parks PSPO with a similar fires and barbecues prohibition came into force on 4 August 2021 and, on its own wording, ran for three years from that date. The council’s public register of orders lists it under “Orders not approved or expired”. The 2021 version also defined its restricted areas by a shaded map rather than a list of names, so a resident could not easily check whether a particular field was in it. The new one names every site.

The new order also drops something. In 2021 a second restricted area covering Port Meadow, Wolvercote Common and Burgess Field made it an offence to cause damage to the land. The 2026 order has no equivalent prohibition, and Wolvercote Common is not in its schedule.

What it means for you

  • From Friday, no barbecues in any of the 40-plus places listed above. That includes disposable barbecues, portable gas barbecues and open fires. The only exception in the wording is a marked designated area.
  • Fireworks and sky lanterns are covered too. With Bonfire Night nine weeks away, a private display in one of these parks is now an offence in its own right unless it is authorised.
  • A £100 fixed penalty is not a parking ticket. If you do not pay it, the council can take you to the magistrates’ court, where the fine runs to £1,000 and you can be ordered to pay costs and compensation.
  • Check the list before you assume. Some obvious Oxford green spaces are not on it, and university and college land is not council land at all.
  • The order lasts until 4 September 2029. The council’s own papers note that it runs past the point Oxford City Council is abolished under local government reorganisation, and that the new unitary authority “could adopt, remove or vary the Order”.
  • If you think the order is unlawful, there is a six-week window. Anyone who lives in, works in or regularly visits a restricted area can apply to the High Court to question its validity, within six weeks of the date it was made, which was 1 September.

Councillor Anna Railton, the cabinet member for planning and zero carbon Oxford, said the council had “reluctantly taken the decision to increase the powers available to tackle reckless behaviour” and asked people to bring a picnic instead. She added that releasing sky lanterns in dry conditions is “completely irresponsible”.

More on the city’s parks and green spaces is in our guide to things to do in Oxford, and the council car parks for Port Meadow are listed in our guide to parking in Oxford.