Dorian Kelly is an entrepreneur, playwright and festival manager. He gives his view on Vineyard Gate.

The Vineyard Gate Project is dead. Really?

If that’s true, it is both a catastrophe for Colchester and a source of great shame for us all.

If large scale retail is now out of the question for Colchester, despite Fenwick leading the way and showing us not only that it cannot only be done, but done spectacularly successfully, can we effectively kiss goodbye to Colchester as an economically developed town and look forward to being a desert of service premises, betting shops, charity outlets, catering houses and alcohol dispensing premises?

I have been following the twists and turns of this increasingly inevitable process since day one, with the sort of fascination usually reserved for watching a snake in a zoo.

Let’s just recap. The original, brilliant masterplan showed a far reaching and imaginative regeneration of the whole of the eastern side of the town centre, at a stroke sweeping away great areas of run down, dilapidated and neglected areas in and around the bus station and St Botolph’s corner and replacing them with employment creating, visitor attracting mix of large retail, small scale shopping, heritage enhancements, housing, transport hubs and culture.

We had the land, we had the resources and above all we had the will.

A developer was chosen and it was not long before Colchester was presented with a choice of three different designs incorporating a modern covered bus station, an enhancement to the neglected and vandalised Roman wall and a high level direct connection to Eld Lane and Wyre streets, which, together with a major development in the old bus park would result in a huge expansion of our tiny town centre, which in turn would lead to a massive economic, social and cultural boom.

Anyone who has followed the ins and outs of this knows how that collapsed. Mistakes were made in not acquiring land and creating watertight contracts.

The obdurate refusal of the developer to incorporate any sort of a bus station after the original unloved bus park in Lewis Gardens had been earmarked for major development and would become unavailable led to a progressive dismantling of all the plans.

Through sheer hard work some of this was rescued and a new developer found, a compromise bus interchange was identified and built and then how that plan in turn collapsed and, was once more rescued and a third set of plans produced, each time smaller and less economically, socially and culturally useful and very expensively, and in the end how that too collapsed.

Why is that such a disaster? Couldn’t Colchester just carry on as it is?

Colchester is a Jekyl and Hyde kind of town. By any normal definition it is really a city.

On the one hand it is the biggest town in the region by population, bigger than Chelmsford or Southend or even Ipswich and set to grow enormously in the not too distant future with the coming of the garden communities.

It has a huge reputation as a centre of excellence for the arts, with one of the best producing theatres, and several galleries, large and small, more theatre groups, choirs, orchestras, bands, poets and comedians (not all of them working for the council) than the rest of Essex and Suffolk put together.

We have a film festival, a comedy festival, and a spectacular classical music festival, a family event virtually every week in our unique and loved park.

It has underexploited heritage attractions including two Roman theatres and the only chariot circus discovered in the UK, the largest castle keep in Britain and our town walls.

On the other hand the town centre is miniscule, less than 1,000 paces east to west and 250 north to south.

Even Crouch Street is considered a bit of an outpost - and as for North Hill, that’s right out!

That has led to the erroneous perception by the people who live here that Colchester is nothing but a small country market town.

Retail specialists have told me that a town of nearly 200,000 souls would normally have two of everything, two WH Smiths, two Boots and so on in separate areas of the town centre.

There are many retail chains that are not represented in Colchester at all: yet in both the smaller Chelmsford and Ipswich they are present, with room for the small independents as well. Why is this?

Well their town centres are a quantum leap bigger, so there is room for everyone.

So it is obvious any attempt to enhance the size of the town centre will have long term beneficial effects.

If this crucial area is given over to housing, then it is lost forever.

We simply cannot sit back and allow this opportunity to slip through the fingers.

So. Let us parcel up the land owned by the borough and set up a nationwide open call for ideas from designers, architects and developers and see what they come up with. They may surprise you.

It might be a Westfield-type mall privately built and run, or maybe a leisure centre with a concert hall to house our many orchestras or touring bands, or even just a nice design of small scale Brighton Lanes-style shopping and housing mix.

It is obvious, however, for a whole raft of reasons that this cannot be directly funded by the local authority who have already spent about £10 million on this debacle.

For reasons I have never been able to comprehend, funding from Europe is now likely to be off the table but there are other more innovative and imaginative funding routes. Let’s explore them.