LETTER: Previous promise must be honoured

Then in the 1980s came the northern bypass on the A264 resulting in the wedge of land between that road and the previous boundary being filled with houses too. When that road was completed, Horsham District Council promised that the A264 bypass delineated the northern boundary of development.

Now we have this enormous threat to a vast tract of field, stream and woodland, killing wildlife, creating more need for services and putting thousands of cars on our already busy roads.

Horsham has already been developed to the point of capacity and I wonder where it will stop. At the present rate all that shall remain of Sussex countryside will be nature reserves, ‘country parks’ and other places physically inaccessible to bulldozers.

This odious trend must be halted somehow and this is where we should start.

The American head of the firm who would like to do this deed promises that dwellings will be ‘well spaced’ with clumps of trees and dinky little ponds in between.

“No-one need walk very far to find a picnic spot,” he said.

That would be all right in some large American states but not here in small Sussex.

If these plans are accepted Horsham shall no longer be a market town, if indeed it still is anyway. It would in fact not be a town at all, but a conurbation.

If local fields run out where will they try to build next time, Denne Park, St Leonard’s Forest? It does not bear thinking about.

To sum up, if the go-ahead is given to this scheme it would be the final nail in Horsham’s coffin, so may today’s councillors keep to the promise made by their predecessors and act in the public’s best interests and refuse this application.

ALLAN SMITH

Beech Grove, Storrington