Imogen Dawson is absolutely right to call for the Station Approach plans to be postponed, or better still cancelled (Chronicle, page 4, July 6).

Like Cllr Horrill, I was initially encouraged by the new involvement of Network Rail, although when I thought more about how the railways are run - about how trains don’t in fact run, how monstrous the car parks they build are, and now about how they want to get rid of ticket offices - the more I doubted the value of their contribution.  And now they’ve pulled out.

Since the last round of plans there has been a major pandemic. Working patterns have changed.  (Retail patterns had already changed, although Winchester City Council has been very slow to realise that.)  The Canary Wharf Group has had its ratings reduced to junk level because its office space is no longer desirable, Woking Borough Council, which invested in major office and retail developments, has gone bust, and councils up and down the country have signed up to zero carbon targets.  As the saying goes, the greenest building is the one that’s already built, and as Cllr Laming has said, there are already significant large empty office blocks in the immediate vicinity.

READ MORE HERE: Calls for Station Approach scheme to be postponed

Cllr Tod wants to link the development to future park & ride sites at Kings Barton and 'potentially' Sir John Moore Barracks.  When are those scheduled?  I’m delighted that St Peter’s car park is finally back in the Local Plan for housing development, but that was supposed to have happened after the first park & ride car park opened about 20 years ago.  Where are the plans for that?

The council seems to offer jam tomorrow, with everything contingent on something else.  The leisure centre at Bar End on selling the River Park site, development at the station on other developers’ vague assurances (Kings Barton is way behind schedule but developers don’t want to build so fast they lower prices), and of course the great golden-egg-laying goose of Central Winchester Regeneration.

What Winchester desperately needs is affordable housing - and not more student blocks - today.

 

Judith Martin,

Romsey Road,

Winchester