THE news that permission has finally been granted for the development of a 24 hour service station on the outskirts of Hexham is to be warmly welcomed.

It is patently absurd that for more than five years, a town with a population of more than 11,000, swollen to many times that number by tourists and people who work in the town, should have had to rely on a single petrol station for its fuel needs.

The queues which built up outside the Shell Garage, in Haugh Lane, even before the Northern Gas roadworks, bear eloquent testimony to the fact the market is there for an alternative outlet.

While the scheme has been welcomed with something approaching rapture by many people, there is still the odd voice complaining that the ancillary developments of a Starbucks coffee shop and a Subway sandwich shop will somehow lure people away from the delights of the town centre.

Does anyone seriously expect that people will climb into their cars and drive out to the bypass, and then back into the town – giving up a precious parking space – just to sit in the equivalent of a motorway service station sipping a mocha choca whopper or whatever?

We suspect the reverse is true, with motorists on the A69 who have long averted their eyes from Hexham when passing the steamy blot on the landscape that is Egger pulling in to fill their tanks and realising there is a dazzlingly historic town to explore just up the road.

The Fewster’s site, where there was a busy garage and shop not so long ago, has been crying out for redevelopment for years, and objectors should remember it could have been home to a Safeway supermarket or a Focus Diy superstore.,

At the moment it looks like a New Age Travellers’ encampment.