I READ on the front page of your edition of Thursday, May 28, “Market Place given funding for revamp”. An artist’s impression accompanies the article.

The issue of a ‘revamp’ for Cirencester Market Place has been in the news and under consultation for a long time now but I still feel compelled to ask what exactly the £1.3 million pound expenditure will achieve? Am I alone in thinking that the ‘new’ Market Place looks very much like the tired old one that we currently have?

Admittedly, I haven’t been able to get to see the actual plans but I have carefully followed the story as it has unfolded in your columns. In all the artists’ impressions, site plans and storylines that you have faithfully reproduced I have never been able to see any really imaginative change to what we currently have.

Although it is probably too late to object I remain unconvinced whether the quite sizeable expenditure now apparently agreed and awaiting the ‘green light’ will really represent value for money.

You rightly observe that discussions about ‘overhauling’ the Market Place have been under way for the past fifty years and indisputably something new is needed. However, it is a shame that we are about to have something (to last perhaps for another half century) that is patently less than adequate.

I would like to have seen something more radical than a simple adjustment of traffic flows and pedestrianisation. My own low cost suggestion would have centred on much more vegetation and large trees, which are absent from the current plans.

Still at least we’ll have a whole twelve months to get used to the new scheme as it is being constructed.

NICHOLAS HENDERSON

Cirencester