HAS some dreadful brain storming disease swept through our local planning department, not only affecting the planners but our local county councillors, or have they all gone stark staring mad?

This can only be the explanation for what has taken place on the Marshfield Bank industrial estate.

In recent weeks we have witnessed the collapse of our environment completely by the construction of two, (and soon to be three) massive manufacturing and distribution warehouses, the height and sheer size of which are mind blowing!

These 'blights' on our residential semi-rural area are a catastrophe for they have completely dwarfed the housing developments, and so called landscaping around them. It is quite simply every house owners worst nightmare coming true!

Most of the residents on the estate where we live were unaware of planning permission being granted for these units to be constructed. We were given NO written warning by the planning department, and even my near neighbour whose windows and garden look directly over these huge structures was not notified by letter.

So we were unable to voice any protest whatsoever to the departments responsible for this 'travesty'! Do our local planning department and councillors imagine that we all walk around wearing blinkers? Or do they assume that we are all brain-dead also?

Residents attended a massive meeting in May 1994 at Lodgefield Primary School where our objections to the plans over Marshfield Bank industrial estate were aired. It was decided by the planning department represented by Mr John Dunning and local councillors, not only was the road structure to be altered, but that the units allowed on the estate would be 'low level', single storey buildings, and in keeping with the local semi rural area. Some of which would be fifteen metres or less in height, and would include extensive landscaping.

For those of us who have bothered to visit the Municipal buildings to not only voice our heated disapproval, and witness for ourselves the next stages of this 'farce', I can only extend my heartfelt sympathy. I only hope that the people in authority who go home at night after a hard days work, sleep soundly in their beds, for they will not have to arise the next morning and look upon this 'out and out carbuncle' on our landscape!

Mrs Patricia A Brown

Local resident

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.