Suggested reading for the ‘dismal dons’

James Hinds’ article [Sometimes best to keep views quiet, December 14] made interesting reading, but his views were not at all surprising. Here we have a young man, speaking from experience, brave enough to confirm what many people have suspected for a long time.

In his article he told us that Jeremy Corbyn’s new book was advertised in his uni book shop, alongside a book about stopping Brexit.

A book that I would thoroughly recommend for every uni library and make compulsory reading, particularly for the academics, would be Quentin Letts’s Patronising Bastards, How The Elite Betrayed Britain. If the academics are not already named in the book I’m sure some would recognise themselves in the chapter headed Dismal Dons. Michael Clark, Meadow Close, Bridge ape Bath or Cambridge or Oxford? Recent developments have eroded the city’s identity. The contrast would be with Faversham or Whitstable whose individual characteristics have been preserved. Canterbury should strive to be Canterbury.

6. The notion that people will “stumble across” the development is absurd: it is well beyond the city limits and unless one is a determined walker access can only be made by car or public transport.

7. The claim that the proposed development is “the best since Marlowe” is, in my book at least, not much of a recommendation. Nor is the thought of a hotel “similar to the Hilton”.

8. What exactly are “incubation hubs”? They sound very much like something out of Huxley’s Brave New World.

9. The images provided by the paper appear unsightly and out-of-keeping with what is, still, a rural environment.

10. One would like to get the University of Kent’s views on the plan. And one hopes, finally, that St Edmund’s School will give the proposal the short shrift it deserves. Roger Clark, Whitstable Road, Canterbury

When I read your report of the proposed development in Giles Lane accompanied by pictures of tilting buildings on stilts I thought I was reading an April Fools joke report three months early. For a start, how can any developer assume they can argue their way into taking a site already assigned to another bidder? The whole report sounds so arrogant; it decries the city’s cultural facilities and assumes what they offer will improve the image of Canterbury and help to ‘make it more like Bath, or Oxford or Cambridge’. Do they really know what they are talking about and have they ever visited those towns?

Canterbury does have hotels, and a new one under construction; it has a large modern theatre and excellent cultural facilities on the University of Kent campus in the Gulbenkian Theatre and cinema and Collyer-ferguson concert hall, along with an adjacent bar and café. As for incubation hubs, they sound as if they are more appropriate for a Nasa space station. Really, do the developers, Citi Nests Ltd, really expect such a proposal to get planning permission on a lane which is in part barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass? If the developers are so keen to give Canterbury something it hasn’t already got, perhaps they could devise a plan for high-quality social housing which is much needed.