I SEE that consultation is being requested, by the main bodies, ie Tendring, Colchester and Essex councils, as to views on the proposed new borders garden town.

There is a saying, you cannot stop progress, nor stay in the past.

Development has been going on in our villages for years, but surely this is a monstrous idea.

In recent years housing has utterly boomed.

Take Alresford - almost a town now, and so with the rest of our countryside villages, yet the infrastructure (roads, doctors schooling etc) has relatively remained the very same, as it was 50 years ago.

To read of the future development of St John’s Plant Centre, just think of all the vehicles being placed on to St John’s Road, extend that picture to summer time, when those from outside our area want to visit our seaside town. It will mean driving as bad say in London.

If you look at a once quiet country road, Little Clacton Road, in the past couple of years, traffic has increased hugely, the same with Sladbury’s Lane.

Now add the proposed garden border town, the question I have is: Are we about to become like South Essex, which is almost now part of London?

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We are told it is progress, but do we want new housing on huge scale, that means villages become towns?

Add the border garden town, and all you have in North Essex is snatches of countryside, the remainder is housing after housing.

If you do not make sure that infrastructure is up to 21st-century standards, then life will be pretty intolerable.

I know of friends and relatives, who once lived in South Essex, moving away to live in Suffolk and Norfolk.

Simply every thing had just become to intolerable to deal with.

If you left Colchester 50 years ago and returned today, you would be 100 per cent lost.

It is bursting out at the seams, so put that proposed garden borders town in, future children will be taken out of their school just to look at some small woods, and fields as the area they live in then will have become one huge massive housing development.

St Osyth will merge with Clacton, Little Clacton will merge into Clacton, even outlying villages, like Great Oakley and Wrabness will be in a huge Clacton/Harwich area.

The loss of countryside under tar and cement is a tragedy waiting to happen.

Barry O’Connell

Saxstead Drive, Clacton