Perhaps your company is well intentioned, but I imagine your main concern is to create profits for your board rather than to create a rich addition to Bridport.

This is only natural in the strange world we share.

There are a number of worrisome matters in your presentation.

The first is the mitigating adverbs used throughout implying you MAY do x, y or z. What is clear is how uncommitted your document is to the things which would help to hide these houses from the rest of us. Is the developer actually going to plant trees, gardens and grasses? Is there going to be a commons and a community centre and if so what will it contain, how big will it be, who will outfit it? Why is there an insistence to move St Mary’s to Vearse Farm? It seems to me, yanking it out of an already impoverished and underserved area and placing it in what looks to be a middle class areas of housing is a travesty of justice. Further, it is clear from research that Bridport needs affordable housing and not more retirement and second homes which your designs seem to hint at. Just how many ‘social houses’ will there be? And will they be of built to the same standards as the rest of the retirement houses? Why does the architecture bare no resemblance to our local vernacular? It reminds me of Mac houses in the States, a customised one format fits all imposition from people who have no sensitivity towards local materials and designs.

Are any of the houses going to have a small ecological footprint? Why are they being built on an area which, two summers ago, was flooded from heavy rainfall?

Are the increase in vital services -roads, school places and teachers, medical facilities- going to be externalised costs borne by local residents or is the developer going to help the town cope with the thousands of new citizens?

I have as yet not spoken to one person who is happy about this uninvited intrusion in our green belt of natural beauty because no one believes your new settlement will help the people of Bridport be housed. The assumption is that our young and poor will struggle even more to find places to live.

Of course, if the developers were to build fine houses for the young and poor, that would be a different matter.

Robert Golden