Should the Vision have a rethink on the Maltings?

AS football fans like to sing when their team is winning: “It’s all gone quiet over there.”
Where exactly is there, on this occasion? Why, the Salisbury Vision.
We haven’t heard anything for ages about their exciting plans for new stores in the Maltings/Central Car Park.
Relaxing with your Salisbury Journal and a cup of tea after fighting your way through the bargain-hunting hordes at the sales, you might ask yourself why this should be.
Our lovely Christmas market, boosted by free-at-the-point-of-use parking, seems to have been a huge success, thank goodness, attracting trippers from far and wide. (One wheelchair user has asked me to point out how much more welcoming it was for disabled people this year than last, thanks to wider aisles between the stalls.)
However, city centre shops are continuing to close their doors at an alarming rate.
So why do the Vision think that the occupants of the new centre will fare any better than those in, say, the Old George Mall or the Cross Keys Chequer – or even the High Street?
What inducements are they offering prospective tenants to make it worth their while chancing their arm?
Isn’t the widely predicted demise of the traditional shopping centre a good excuse to stop and think again about the use of this large, level site within easy walking distance of all the necessary facilities?
We have a dire shortage of affordable homes. We have an ageing population. We want older people to move out of properties that are too big for them to make way for the younger generation. In fact, if they’re social housing tenants on benefits, we’re cruelly forcing them to do so.
With Wiltshire Council under orders to find more land for housing, what about turning part of the Central Car Park into purpose-built accommodation for the elderly, who might then support the retailers we’ve still got? There’s more than one way to revitalise a city centre.
But will the profit motive prevent the council and other landowners from seeing it?
After all, the prospect of lucrative commercial development must have been Salisbury’s key attraction for the cash-hungry invaders from Trowbridge, to whom, of course, I wish a Happy New Year.