WELL, I had my meeting with Longford Estate on Wednesday, so that they could promote their planning application for housing development on the Britford Lane meadows.

As part of the process I was given a rather long speech by a representative of Longford Estate (perhaps the Earl was busy) about (and I paraphrase) how Longford really aren’t rolling in cash and nobody realises but we have people who work for us who we have to actually pay, and did you know we give large amounts of money to charity every year? Not to mention the fact that we gave away a very small amount of land to Salisbury Council many years ago. So you see we’re not the monsters everyone thinks we are.

Well, thank goodness they managed to scrape together the pennies to pay for the transport agency, the architects, the PR firm, the environment surveys etc, etc that were needed to try and persuade us that building on this site is a good idea.

Unfortunately it didn’t work and I remain unconvinced as do many others.

Perhaps Longford Estate should wait until housing sites have been allocated before applying to build houses there as is the usual democratic process.

I’m not sure where St Nicholas Hospital representatives were on Wednesday, perhaps they were put off by the rain.

ROSIE BARLOW Salisbury