Leaving aside for the moment the manifest shortcomings of the application to demolish three family homes in Dyke Road, I would like to focus on some more general points.

1 This is not a "site". It is a long-established plot of three individual family homes.

2 Totem was referred to in an Argus article as a "developer" formed to "fund" such developments. This is wrong. It is a speculative architectural practice which, if ever armed with planning permission, will then seek a developer to fund the project.

3 In its planning application summarisation, Totem refers to the "inefficiency" of the current housing arrangements. The concept that land is being "inefficiently" used is an interesting one. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not common land, it is privately owned and the owners should decide whether it is being "efficiently" used or not.

There is an unsettling arrogance in the manner in which Totem presumes to determine an appropriate "efficient" future for land which it does not own.

-Peter Thomas, Hove