WHO is this Tidy Britain Group and how do they allocate their awards?

They have obviously not been down Seymour Road recently, and if they have there must be some dreadful areas in other towns to award Bolton a prestigious award.

I continually clean the pavement around our house of dog muck, bottles, cans, crisp packets, cigarette packets, rubbish from the local take-aways etc, which are deposited on the 50 yards or so of pavement around our house.

For this, we have the privilege to pay the thick end of £1,000 per year in Council Tax. Seymour Road itself is breaking up and you can actually see the old setts. The council should re-surface the road or "cold-plane" it and restore the old setts which would also act as a traffic calming measure.

It appears to me and to other people who live around the Seymour Road area, that the council has forgotten about us and is keen to spend unlimited amounts of money on other areas of the town; even some back streets have been re-surfaced and had traffic calming measures installed, as well as the corresponding front streets.

I see a council worker picking litter on Belmont Road every day, including Saturday and Sunday morning, and he even goes into the front gardens of some of the houses to recover litter. I have been told, in the past, that Belmont Road and Blackburn Road are major routes into Bolton, and as such should be kept as clean as possible to attract visitors.

"Forget the visitors" I say, "and look after the people who pay for the upkeep that they justly deserve." Most of the people travelling down Belmont Road and Blackburn Road are going to join St Peter's Way en route to somewhere else.

Barrie Hetherington

Seymour Road

Astley Bridge

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.