I REFER to Coun Robert Gould’s appeal for the residents of Dorchester ‘to get behind his Charles Street scheme’.

Coun Gould should know by now that the people of Dorchester, have by and large, always accepted the principle of the re-development of the Charles Street area since first proposed in the early 1970s but always with one over-arching condition.

The Walks must be protected from any inappropriate development at all cost. It is the grossly out-of-scale new office building that is so disturbing to the people of Dorchester.

Its construction will irretrievably damage and devalue the character of South Walks for all time.

The hideous building would amount to the rape of the Walks. It has a frontage the same length and approximately the same height, as the Mall elevation of Buckingham Palace (please note Mr Gould, frontage length and height, not floor area as implied by your duplicitous answer to ‘commonly asked questions’.) I suggest that Coun Gould should organise a public consultation meeting in, say, the Corn Exchange at Dorchester. The Duchy should be invited to elaborate on what appears to us the public to be a very credible and realistic offer, which would save both the Walks from the horrendous office building and a considerable sum of our money.

Coun Gould could then address the meeting to explain his incredible and unrealistic justification for rejecting some £3million saving on an office building, rejecting a further £1million for the sale of the Walks office site and saving a further £2.2million of county council expenditure, making a total of nearly £6million of tax payer funds.

Up to this moment in time the public has had no participation and no voice in the promotion of this version of the Charles Street project and therefore has no ownership of the project and no respect for the proposed development.

Coun Gould and his Conservative members should for once get behind the electorate and reconsider the position. They could respect the views of the Dorchester residents and withdraw their office element of the Charles Street development.

The district council could move to the new offices in Queen Mother Square at Poundbury and perhaps then the public could look forward to the product of the Simons private investment.

DAVID OLIVER RIBA, (retired WDDC District Architect), Poundbury, Dorchester