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Comment

SIR - Your correspondent B P Porter (Chronicle letters, April 10) asks when did the city of Winchester become a town. The answer is 1974.

In that year Winchester's local council was amalgamated with Winchester Rural District Council and Droxford Rural District Council.

The new council created had two options. One was to become Winchester District Council with a chairman as civic head.

This would, however, mean the end of the road for Winchester's mayoralty - the oldest in England with the possible exception of London.

The other option was to transfer the city status to the district so that the Mayoralty could be retained.

This was agreed locally and endorsed by the Secretary of State.

So the entire district is now the City of Winchester.

Winchester itself is, strictly speaking, not a city, but is still part of a city.

We use the terms Town Access Plan, Town Forum and Town Rate to make it clear that we are talking about Winchester, rather than the entire district.

This is not "a sloppy use of terminology" as B P Porter suggests, but a sensible approach.

Surely what we call Winchester is not as important as making sure that it remains a beautiful, historic community of which we can all be proud.

And having a Mayoralty going back over 800 years is part of that heritage.

Frederick Allgood, Mayor of Winchester 1989-90, and city councillor, Denmead.

3:08pm Wednesday 16th April 2008

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