Both Simon Lever and Eben Wilson are right (Letters, January 4, '"Bushfield plan ‘must be cancelled"', and 'We need homes’) but Eben Wilson is misinformed. 

The Church Commissioners who own the land at Bushfield tried for at least 20 years to get permission to build housing there. They were repeatedly and correctly dismissed. The current plan provides no permanent housing.

Then the site was shoehorned into the Local Development Plan by one council leader, to the surprise of officers and everyone else, for a ‘knowledge park’, not a classification actually known in planning.

Now it’s become some massive business-cum-academic proposal offering thousands of jobs. Winchester’s unemployment rate is about half the UK’s average. It will not be local people who take these jobs. Where will the new employees live? Probably they will just commute in, adding to the council’s difficulty in hitting its net zero target. Meanwhile there is ample space available in the University of Southampton’s science parks.

Winchester undoubtedly needs genuinely affordable housing, but that is not what is proposed here.

In fact, the development will require the building of even more homes than are already needed.
Eben Wilson must be aware that there are at least two major development sites being discussed yet again: Central Winchester (Silver Hill) and the Station Area. Both previously promoted out-of-date models for retail and office space, but hopefully now will focus on housing. Certainly one of the architects cited for Central Winchester, Peter Barber, has an extraordinary record of success with attractive high-density, low-rise, urban social housing. Then there are the future plans for Sir John Moore Barracks, which could easily provide a relatively self-contained housing development.

I may be a middle-class tree-hugger (though not a dog-walker) but anyone who has read anything I’ve written over about 30 years must know that I believe firmly in the importance of both social housing and the natural environment. They should not be incompatible. What I object to is unfettered growth that serves only the developer.

Judith Martin,
Romsey Road,
Winchester

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