Buildings that have made peace with their past

SIR – Andrew Roberts (Sunday Comment, July 19) was forthright in his opposition to the renaming of streets and pubs with a colonial connection.

In Uganda under British rule and for a while after independence, the main hotel in Kampala was the Imperial Hotel, where my wife and I held our wedding reception in 1963. By the time we left the capital in 1969, however, the name had been changed. It had become the Grand Hotel (rather unimaginative and still very British).

On our return in 1998, there had been another renaming: it was now (and still is) the Grand Imperial Hotel. Such an approach is more mature than the juvenile tantrums of the “woke”, and the spineless acquiescence from those who should know better.

KC Doherty

Wallingford, Oxfordshire

SIR – I assume that the decision by Watford council to rename four of the town’s street names has accounted for the fact that every resident and business on those streets will have to inform their own banks, credit card companies, the DVLA, building societies and insurance companies of the change. They will also, of course, have to update family and friends.

Joyce Cooper

Oldham, Lancashire

SIR – It is worth taking a moment to reflect upon the wisdom of changing street names.

I am currently reading a biography of Coco Chanel and have reached the not particularly flattering part about her life during the Second World War. Separate to that is a commentary upon the treatment of Jews under the Vichy regime in the “unoccupied zone”.

An early strategy invoked by the leaders of the Vichy regime was the removal of street names commemorating Jewish people. One of the first to go in Nice was the Rue de Rothschild. Charles Hill Burley Woodhead, West Yorkshire