I ATTENDED the meeting about the "Super Estate"held in the Council Chambers and the one at the Carnegie Hall. At both meetings, everyone was disgruntled at this Christmas bombshell.

The bottom line is that if it goes ahead, it will be like losing pounds and being compensated by pennies. In short, there are little sweeteners, but they are only there to help the poison to go down.

Quite a number of people have said that if development should come, it should come to the "sacred" land of Hulton Park, where no one is allowed to go. That area is huge and could swallow up a 1,000- house estate on land that would not be missed.

In recent years, I have been in areas like Petersfield. A case in point was a ride to Cambridge where on the A1, I could travel for miles without seeing an estate. Westhoughton should have remained a village like those backwater places down there.

I cannot now see why Westhoughton is such a magnet for developers. We actually had more facilities in the good old days with a population of 15,000 and many including myself working locally, hence fewer cars on the road irrespective of a much smaller population.

I was recently in the Turton Heights area, and because of the heavy traffic it took me over half an hour to get home, and that was on a Sunday!

I congratulate T Howarth who is my next door neighbour (no relation), and Gwen and Jim Parr. We have lost so much and it is about time the development stopped in its tracks.

B Howarth

Alexandria Drive, Westhoughton

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