Focus on the positive

WEEK after week the Letters to the Editor columns include letters criticising the works taking place on Bexhill's sea front.(Next Wave Project). Now that these works are complete in some areas and nearing completion in others the writers have become ever more opinionated and censorious. The shelters being likened to chicken huts, the plantings will 'all be dead within a year' and a 'brutalist concrete wasteland is being built on the eastern side of the colonnade'. The usual suspects being responsible for most of the letters, but now and again new names join the list.

I decided to write this letter after reading two that appeared last week, the contents of which totally appalled me as to the effect they and others like them may be having on the numbers of tourists coming to Bexhill. The first one by Vox Pop Jackie Bialeska, the latest in a very long line of similar outpourings, now focuses on the concrete works at the Colonnade. I will not quote too much from it, but note that according to her the proposed restaurant is “another disaster in the making”. Thanks Jackie for your vote of confidence in our town’s future.

The second headed “Seafront is a junkyard” was submitted by a writer new to me - D. Kingsnorth. To quote just one phrase “ the sea front looks like a graveyard in a junk yard”. Thank you D Kingsnorth, that comment together with your other gems will surely help to swell visitor numbers to Hastings and Eastbourne this summer. I would like to make just two further observations on this letter; to outsiders most construction sites look a shambles before project completion and the world has moved on since you first visited the town 42 years ago.

I understand that visitor numbers to Bexhill are down this year. Of course there are many reasons for the declining visits but the weekly outpourings from our ‘concerned residents’ certainly do not help matters. Rather than negatively forecasting gloom and doom for any new innovative project may I suggest that all concerned focus on the positive features of our town. You never know, you may enjoy life a little more and at the same time help the town’s businesses during the current difficult period.

JOHN BETTS

Eden Drive

Bexhill