Don’t destroy Torquay’s Princess Gardens

HOW I agree with your two correspondents regarding the desecration of Rock Walk and now the pathetic phantasmagorical plotting to destroy one of the things that IS Torquay, the Princess Gardens.

Is this some emulation of the greatest of all exponents of transforming the landscape, one Capability Brown, only not by enhancing the countryside but by defiling it on the same grand scale with bricks and concrete?

Sadly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the Victorians gave us delightfully proportioned buildings with gothic overtones like the Passmore Edwards building in Newton Abbot, offset on the other corner of the town by its hideous modern equivalent of the 21st century, the concrete excrescence of flats above a certain well-known carpet store, the concrete edifice of which resembles the bridge of some doomed ship!

The totally unimaginative short-sighted visions of mayor Bye are unbelievable, but then this is the minimalistic, functional, glass-topped coffee table in the living room generation and one wonders what the next generation of Torquay’s managing masters will do to leave their mark on the remains of Torquay, once the watering place of the elite and famous for its gentility and beauty.

I envisage no green spaces, no parks, no fields, and the only sign of ‘countryside’ being the remnants of some shrivelled cactus pot plant on Mr Everyman’s windowsill.

If today is the result of ‘beauty’ being in the eye of the beholder, perhaps its time they went, as the advertisement says, to a certain well-known chain of opticians!

Wayland Van Hildyck-Smith

Forde Park

Newton Abbot