New Barton Farm layout creates more problems than it solves

I also notice that it gets us all arguing the merits of this or that detail, as though it were already a foregone conclusion that 2,000 houses on a greenfield site with less than adequate infrastructure to support them, will indeed happen!

A bit of ‘applied psychology’ at work here?

There are many points that will be raised against this new plan so I will confine this letter to what I consider the main objection.

It must be an extreme folly to divert a main arterial road such as Andover Road, even with speed limits, to run through what CALA Homes themselves call “the heart” of the development.

At present there are four roads that exit on to Andover Road on this section.

I counted around 10 proposed roads that would exit onto the new diverted road.

At the centre of this sits a “mixed use centre”, the “village centre” with shopping area, and a primary school, each of these attracting their own traffic flows like a magnet attracts iron filings.

In short, the local traffic from 2,000 homes will be competing with through traffic on an already busy arterial road.

Add to this melee of traffic, the extra load that regularly blocks up Andover Road whenever an accident occurs on the A34 with all the ensuing emergency vehicles, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Stop treating housing targets like the Ten Commandments handed down from an all-knowing Westminster.

Ask any estate agent and they will tell you, if they are honest, that they have enough enquiries from London home-seekers to fill Barton Farm twice over.

This development would do little to answer the housing needs of local people.

One alternative plan that avoids all of these problems is to leave Barton Farm as it is, a green field site of outstanding natural beauty.

Let’s hope that common sense will prevail. Nothing I have heard so far persuades me otherwise.

A Fyfe (Mr), Harestock Road, Winchester.