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Planning - Marooned in a retail desert
With the announcement that the partial development of the station area is to go ahead, I think we can see the beginning of the end of the town as a viable focus for the district.
In essence, the site urgently needs revamping and a choice of main supermarkets can only improve the local offer BUT, in partly reversing the commercial drift of the last five decades, the current plans will leave the town fragmented, clumsy and no longer user friendly.
By funnelling shoppers into the northern dip, the banks that relocated to South Rd – Barclays from Market Place, Lloyds from Boltro Road and Midland (HSBC) from the Broadway – will now be marooned in a retail desert where The Orchards’ future, and M&S with it, must be limited.
The Medical Centre, library, council offices, police station, court and CAB will remain awkwardly betwixt and between so that shoppers needing one or more of those facilities will, as now, be obliged to add to congestion by shuttling from one to the other(s).
Some years ago there was a scheme floated that would have utilised the enormous cubic area in the cutting south of the station for a modern shopping centre and concentrated all civic functions into one Civic Tower where the existing station forecourt and petrol station now sit – all one’s needs within walking distance of one another and on one access level with parking, buses, taxis and trains fully integrated for shoppers and commuters alike.
N C Turner,
Drimoleague, Co Cork,
Rep of Ireland.
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Weather for Haywards Heath
Sunday 26 May 2013
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Temperature: 5 C to 18 C
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