Negative comments...

'St Alban' (England's real patron saint?) emails us through the website with some objections to our campaign. He writes...

"I'd like to use the Tesco site to construct a conference centre that can be used by NIMBY's from all over the UK.

"Then we can all get together to discuss how we can force our views on everyone, pressurise any random person on the street to sign our petitions (preferably those who don't live in the town the development is in) and generally stand in the way of progress.

"We can also work on our propaganda techniques to liken the building of a supermarket to a world ending apocalypse. Please!"

We would like to write back personally, but the email address he left doesn't work - so we thought we'd write back on the blog...

Firstly, we don't think we're NIMBYs - we know the Eversheds site needs to be used for something and we have strong ideas what we'd like to see there. We'd love to see a modern school and affordable housing on the site as well as space for local businesses and for recreation. We would have liked to have seen the site developed on years ago rather than being left to fall into disrepair by its owner. What we can't see is how building yet another huge supermarket (replicating the dozens within a 30-minute drive) attracting hundred of cars each hour and causing pollution can be seen as progress.

Secondly, we've hardly had to 'pressurise people' to sign our petition - we've often had 3 or more people at a time queuing up to sign when we've been out and about. And we can hardly exert the same pressure as Tesco - a number of people have said that they would love to sign the petition 'but my company does lots of work for them and so I can't'. We've not collected signatures outside of the centre of the city - and surely if someone regularly travels into St Albans to use the market, they're as entitled as anyone to fight to keep it.

OK, Sandy Walkington did compare the Tesco development to an 'atom bomb' - but I think that's more exaggeration for effect than a physical description. But we do like the idea of a conference centre as we've already had someone suggest a hotel - both would benefit St Albans without damaging local businesses, the market and clogging up a major traffic artery.