I AM dismayed to see a planning application to demolish yet another house in the Chorley New Road Conservation Area, referred to as a school building, but which is actually a nice Victorian house in good general repair, used until very recently by Clevelands preparatory school.

I have no doubt this relatively innocuous-sounding proposal is no more than a precursor to a linked proposal to build a considerable number of houses on the site, a proposal which recent experiences, also in the Chorley New Road Conservation Area, show will be hard to oppose once the site is cleared and derelict. Like several other developments in the pipeline for this Conservation Area, this is clearly contrary to the planning objectives of Bolton Council in a number of ways detailed in the recent booklet Chorley New Road Conservation Area issued by the Environment Department.

Of particular concern is that this is only the latest in a series of applications to destroy the large and mainly elegant buildings that give this area much of its character. Each estate that replaces a house or a green field seems to have smaller houses more closely packed together than the last, leading to a progressive deterioration in the nature of this Conservation Area, clearly contrary to Bolton Unitary Plan Policies a,b, & c as listed in the appendix, and Section 2 on page 13, starting with the words New development must reflect the character of existing buildings. Another major anxiety for anyone who uses Chorley New Road is the effect of the considerable number of vehicles from these estates feeding into it directly, and their difficulty in doing so safely, especially since the Council has virtually doubled the traffic density by reducing two lanes to one on much of this already congested road.

It is surely time to call a halt to this sequence of demolishing house after house and building a series of small estates in their grounds, before the character of this area is lost forever and one of Bolton pleasanter approaches becomes just another conglomeration of suburban housing estates.

Peter Loughlin

(Address supplied)