City under siege

I HAVE yet to meet a single person who wants a hotel and drive-through McDonalds squeezed onto the tiny wild space between Tesco and Southampton Road.

Doesn’t mean it won’t happen, though.

People who actually live here can see in an instant how idiotic it would be to plonk a traffic-generating dining destination alongside the city’s worst bottleneck.

Or to expect weekending tourists to hop on a park and ride bus and join the queues into town.

Some have joked that at least there’d be something to eat in the jams.

But judging by the time it takes to creep from Tesco’s car park onto the main road, a hungry trucker could demolish a Big Mac and fries before he even edged off the fast-food forecourt. I suppose that would make for safer driving.

I’m not saying there’s no place for a ‘drive-thru’ in Salisbury, though. Just not this place.

By the way, I stand corrected. The site in question is not flood plain, as I said last week. Not officially.

It is, however, currently – and frequently - under water. So maybe the official definition of flood plain needs revisiting.

Sure, the land level could be raised. But all flood water’s got to go somewhere.  Into the Sainsbury’s car park opposite, perhaps?

Why, when the South Wiltshire core strategy provides more land for new building than most of us thought could ever be required, do developers persist in piling into Southampton Road?

And why had they been discussing the hotel scheme with council planners for more than a year before bothering to ask the public about it? Of course they won’t want to see all the effort they’ve invested go to waste.

But the madness doesn’t stop there.

Now another supermarket chain wants to snap up the Old Manor site, following the authorities’ failure to ensure the construction of much-needed housing for the elderly.

Oh my, that’ll work wonders for the rush-hour traffic on the ring road.

No doubt the architects will churn out some faux-folksy design, a sort of shoppers’ Poundbury, to ‘blend in’ with the surrounding listed buildings. But does Salisbury need four giant supermarkets – and not one of them near all its new homes?

Does nobody have any plan for any part of our lovely city that doesn’t involve ‘sympathetically designed’ retail sheds, fast-food restaurants, and high-density housing estates the size of a small planet?

anneriddle36@gmail.com