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So why not concrete over Regent’s Park?
• I DON'T understand why Simon Jenkins is making so much fuss about Goals Soccer Centres’ plans to concrete over five acres of Regent’s Park.
It’s going on everywhere else, what’s so special about Regent’s Park?
About 5 per cent of the population would rather watch soccer than walk their dogs, play with their children, picnic or jog on a sunny day, and London is all about equality and accommodating minority groups.
Besides, we have so much green grass in London already.
Even around St Paul’s, among the remaining gravestones I spotted some.
All this talk about how our parks are the lungs of the city – well, I’m sure there are some inconvenient truths in that one, too.
I’m sure the rest of the park can absorb the fumes from all the extra traffic that the centre will attract.
The residents fretting about the loss of 75 trees can always fundraise next year to plant some more.
And you have to admit that Regent’s Park is even older than Ming Campbell. It has to get hip to appeal to today’s youth.
The Olympics ushered in a new fashion, confiscating family businesses, bulldozing untidy allotments, building lovely homes on “boring” green belt land. And that’s only for two weeks: after that, it becomes a depot for Sainsbury’s.
Goals’ “groundbreaking” architecture (see left) is forever!
JOYCE GLASSER
Savernake Road, NW3
Wrong site
• WHAT kind of signal does it send when the only remaining truly natural space in Regent’s Park is turned over to development for the least natural form of sporting activity supported commercially by a clubhouse and bar? This belongs in an urban setting not in a unique corner of parkland.
PETER DARLEY
address supplied
Park pitches ‘desecration’
• REGENT'S Park is an area of outstanding beauty, enjoyed by thousands of people every day (Pitch battle over park’s threatened meadows, October 11).
It is already well supplied with football pitches, and the proposal to allow millionaire Sir Rodney Walker to concrete over and destroy five acres of wild meadow for yet another of his five-a-side soccer centres would be a shameful desecration of this precious environment.
SELINA HASTINGS
by email
Where is the balance?
• YOUR article by Tom Foot and Richard Osley (Pitch Battle over Park’s Threatened Meadow, October 11) was extremely well presented and balanced.
It is a shame that The Royal Parks Agency, strapped for cash though they are, cannot strive for a better balance for all users of Regent’s Park. I would have thought that 100 acres of the Park’s 500 which are devoted to football would be a fair share.
Even though in your article Lord Coe was quoted as saying he was “delighted to hear about the sports development plans for Regent’s Park,” one wonders if he truly knows what the plans are.
Certainly the proposed five-a-side complex is more about profits and propping up the Park’s finances and far less about football, which is already admirably served by the Park. An alcohol licence and buildings that can be used for weddings and corporate functions has little to do with training and inspiring
first-class athletes.
It is high time that the rights of all residents of London were considered and not solely the economic gain to be realised by the relative few when building proposals and plans such as these are railroaded through planning committees.
ROBIN J BLACK
London W1
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