Last updated 13:25, Thursday, 03 July 2008

IN REPLY to the purchase of Clive Brown’s premises by Haltwhistle Partnership (an unelected quango that doesn’t publish minutes of meetings and holds all meetings but its AGM in private).

There are at least six other shops for sale or empty on the main street. Does the partnership intend buying these as well? The partnership is to vacate its own premises to relocate to the library, leaving yet another gap in the streetscape.

As the owner of five flats nearby, I am also amazed that it believes the planning permission for the proposed four flats is a done deal. Each of mine has a parking space and there is a huge garden area to the rear, insisted upon by planning regulations.

Where on earth are these people to park? Even people in ‘affordable flats’ need cars to get to work. There is also no amenity space in the rear of the building.

Tagging on the magic word ‘affordability’, which is never based on local salaries in the first place, should not override planning regulations which require myself and other private developers to provide parking and amenity space to a minimum standard.

The new shops (2) will also require parking for staff and loading and unloading goods. The purchase and development is also almost £1 million. Make me an offer: I have five flats nearby that you can have fully occupied for lots less than that.

Do they not realise why the shop was not sold to private buyers? In the present financial climate, hopefully they should also have paid well below value, though I am pleased for the Browns who I traded alongside for five years.

Will this also encourage other retailers to stop trading, knowing the partnership will buy them out?

Parking in this area is already horrific, particularly outside these premises where double parking, parking on yellow lines, etc, is the order of the day. The parking problem will be further highlighted now that the church hall car park has been sold to developers who have allocated this space, and rightly so, to their new tenants.

One more point not lost on ordinary folk, is what appears to be a slap in the face for the Co-op, for having the audacity to stand up to the partnership which thought it disgraceful that a long established shop would not give up its car park for up to a year. This is the siting by Sainsbury’s of two huge signs in the former Clive Brown shop.

The money spent on this venture, close to £1 million, would have been better spent in replacing the ‘patio’ that is supposed to be a market place of neither use nor ornament, and prior to its present state was a well used parking area, now reduced to a shambles by dreamers.

Two other retail premises also on the market place are, in my view, far worse in design detail than Browns’ shop, which for those who remember was formerly Walter Willson, which moved to larger premise nearby as parking is crucial to the ‘convenience’ shopping that Haltwhistle offers.

This town is not Corbridge. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, etc, now deliver virtually anything without the expense of fuel. Retail is dying; sad but true.

GEOFF SLOAN,

By email