BOLTON-le-Moors" -- another ludicrous suggestion from Cllr Harkin.

Fred Dibnah is right -- our industrial heritage is not the problem. However, how we are perceived is.

The only change Bolton needs is to get rid of the disastrous "Greater Manchester". Political gagging means Bolton Council cannot acknowledge the blatantly obvious fact that we, a city in all but name, with a true population of around 300,000, are effectively advertising ourselves as second best.

We are no more part of Manchester than Coventry is part of Birmingham, and yet, by allowing our town to be perceived as merely peripheral, we do not work to bring investment to this area so much as send it down the road. For proof, one has only to compare the phenomenal development of Manchester with the languishing state of Bolton, which had worked for 30 years to become one of the North-west's premier town centres.

One of the last acts of the GMC was to demote Leigh from a sub-regional to a "large district" centre. A teenager at the time, I warned in a letter to the Evening News (August 3, 1983) that the same thing could eventually happen to Bolton -- reduced to a collection of cheap shops serving only the inner area of the old county borough. So much for spread of advantage.

Scaremongering? I hope I am not right, but fear the writing is on the wall.

Bolton Council has supinely subscribed to a document which seeks to perpetuate an identity for this 1970s mistake; a document which summarises the role of boroughs such as Bolton merely in terms of providing the centre (meaning Manchester) with personnel, skills and expertise. On the M61 at Farnworth, one is now invited to follow signs for the "City Centre" -- meaning Manchester. Yet Bolton is the highways authority!

Is it any wonder, given such defeatism, that we lost out on city status to Preston, a town half our size?

A V Bowyer

Fallowfield Way,

Atherton.