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Why cling onto Sobell? It’s past its sell-by date
• HOW can anyone seriously prefer to just patch up the Sobell Leisure Centre, rather than improve and expand it (Sobell to be demolished, September 5)?
Surely, refurbishing the centre is just storing up more problems for the future. Do these people want it to fall down around users’ ears and then cost us even more to sort out? That’s just a false economy.
We desperately need a new swimming pool in the area and I reckon most people would welcome this rather than cling onto a building that is well past its sell-by-date and is crumbling around us.
What chance is there of improving the services offered if we keep it the same as it is now? With the recent success of Team GB at the Beijing Olympics we need to be thinking now about the future. We need to be improving leisure facilities in the run-up to London 2012, not clinging onto the past.
VAMSI VELAGAPUDI
Drayton Park, N5
• I DON' T understand your front-page story last week about the Sobell Leisure Centre.
On the one hand you say that the council is pressing ahead without checking residents’ and users’ views, yet in the same breath say that 60,000 people in the north of the borough were asked their opinion. You can’t have it both ways!
It’s not the council’s fault if only 2.7 per cent of people bothered to respond. You can’t force people to reply.
You could argue equally that 97.3 per cent of the people were happy with the proposals so didn’t feel the need to answer!
SIMON VASELLA
Aberdeen Park, N5
• COUNCILLOR Ruth Polling’s confidence that she is “doing the right thing” in demolishing the Sobell Centre and selling off much of its site for housing, despite objections from a large part of the community, feels strangely like Tony Blair at his most self-righteous.
And her over-spun claim that the council exercise was “the largest consultation on a single project in Islington’s history” would have sounded less Blair-like if the consultation had not simply involved telling us the council’s intentions, offering little in the way of facts or figures, then appearing to discount the small percentage of responses received and the large number of objections raised. These came from people who feel the whole site would be better kept for recreational use, and that the argument for demolishing rather than refurbishing the existing building simply has not been made. A thousand people, for example, have already signed our petition against selling any of the site to pay for its redevelopment, and emails continue to arrive daily.
This council survives on a morally dubious ‘majority’ of the mayor’s casting vote, yet seems to feel, from comments such as Cllr Polling’s, that this gives it sufficient absolute mandate to pawn the borough’s sporting future for the benefit of maybe 150 (doubtless deserving) home-seekers.
By the time this letter is published, the council executive will have considered the results of its “consultation” and decided how it intends to move forward on the Sobell.
I very much hope it will have had the humility and strength of character to take on board people’s valid concerns, and reconsider its approach.
ANDREW MYER
Green Party Highbury Team
Horsell Road, N5
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