‘Developer’ almost the ultimate insult

In your May 25 report of the city council’s planning committee, in the item about 38 South Street you refer to me as “developer Bob Britnell”; now in my 40 years as a town planner I have met and worked with or worked against lots of developers, both when I was at the city council and since I went private, but I have never been a developer.

In the case of 38 South Street I was acting as a planning agent to help out friends, but I am not a developer and nor are my friends who own the property.

This might seem a small point, but calling a planner a developer is almost the ultimate insult and I don’t want any of my planning friends thinking I’ve taken up developing; nor do I want to be inundated with brochures and marketing material from builders’ merchants and others who think I might be in the market for building materials. Bob Britnell Orchard Close Canterbury Barry Freeman led The Naked Bike Ride protest against cars and pollution in Canterbury on Saturday

imaginative thinking, it can involve adapting buildings.

I hope Becket House can develop in that direction – after all they did it with Tate Modern! Penny Tyler by email

Minorities Council, Canterbury InterFaith Action, residents’ associations, schools, and others.

Bring your own food to eat or share with everyone else – and maybe you can share theirs, too. Weather permitting, there will also be a street party outside.

The event is open to everyone, with free entry. Do come and help to celebrate the fantastic mix of people from around the world who make up our city. Richard Norman St Michael’s Place, Canterbury not in the USA or places worldwide where we are now being exhorted to turn to.

I assume by “the good old days” they mean where central government and local councils provided most of the services, where multinational chains did not dominate the high street and people did not eat “on the hoof”, talk in public on their mobile phones or, more distressingly, sleep on the streets.

The house that my son is renting is going to be purchased by the town for social housing, something we are so desperately lacking here.

I can only hope that in the next two years we come to realise we are leaving the last vestiges of the old life we so treasured for a leap into the “brave new world” which is already causing so much disquiet among older people.

Perhaps people going to continental Europe for their holidays should observe the way of life there and compare it to the way things are going here.

Take a look at www.bestforbritain. org to start a return to “the good old days”! Mike Armstrong Queens Avenue, Canterbury