THE more I hear about Bolton Council's ideas, the more I ask: "Do they live on the same planet as the rest of us?" Now the council is proposing to build another road, this time through Bolton town centre.

Older residents will remember that a road, Newport Street, ran straight through the town, with buses stopping outside the Town Hall. They closed it and made it a precinct!

What is all this about trying to attract shoppers? The council has already driven them away by allowing retail parks to be built outside the town.

The only hope to attract people back is not to build more roads leading nowhere, but to concentrate on Bolton's history and fine architecture to appeal to the tourist.

They have demolished a fine town, and are obsessed with more and more roads and car parks, reducing in size what is essentially an old Northern market and cotton town.

People like myself like to visit places of interest such as Chester and York. So the council should be doing more to try to preserve what, sadly, is left of our town.

This proposed road will be yet another blot on the already barren landscape, involving the demolition of even more of Bolton's history, until there isn't much left.

The Water Place was unique to Bolton, but the council closed it. Bolton has to have something more than shops. What a town needs is an individual identity.

The only roads Bolton needs are the ones it already possesses -- taking people away who would otherwise have stayed. Once Bolton has been demolished, it cannot be rebuilt.

S Corns

Almond Street

Bolton