A clutch of London’s most successful restaurant chains are heading up the M40 to open new outlets in Oxford’s Westgate shopping and leisure complex, which reopens after a £440million redevelopment later this year.

Polpo (pictured), Russell Norman’s tribute to the Venetian small-plates bacaro, heads the list alongside Sticks & Sushi, Pho, Shoryu ramen, Comptoir Libanais, Pizza Pilgrims, and the first branch outside London of New York comfort food chain Dirty Bones. In all, there will be 25 food and drink outlets.

The Westgate project, a combined effort by Land Securities and the Crown Estate, aims to revive a brutalist eyesore whose 1970s construction destroyed much of the archaeological remains of medieval Oxford.