SIR – I may well be, as John Phillpott claimed while damning me with faint praise, “terminally misguided”, but I would appear to have a relationship with facts which differs from his.

For the last time, it simply ain’t true that there was a plan 17 years ago “to concrete over Cripplegate park and replace the lawns, shrubs and borders.” The plan was to increase the size of Cripplegate by extending it right up to the river-bank, diverting roads and ridding the site of an existing nightspot and associated parking.

No matter how many times this lie be perpetrated, it cannot alter what is a matter of archived fact. It’s all right, I suppose, for a small provincial newspaper to seek to increase its circulation through this sort of hysterical imagining, but some of us had to take our responsibilities a little more seriously.

David Barlow
Worcester