Your story about the Falmer stadium project possibly being delayed and requiring another public inquiry due to the need to marginally re-align a minor public footpath (The Argus, October 18) confirms our experience of the legal and planning processes relating to the West Pier.

As with the Albion stadium, the plans for the restoration of the West Pier were subject to years of public consultation prior to their acceptance by the various authorities.

Acceptance of the policy for the restoration and the council's decisive vote in favour of planning permission were major steps forward.

However, all major projects such as the West Pier and the football stadium require a number of minor legal and technical orders after they have been granted planning permission.

In the case of the West Pier, all of those technical orders flow from and are in line with the approved policy and permissions.

Yet the state of our planning laws and procedures is such that a single objector to just one of those orders can at worst frustrate and at best further delay the project - often using arguments in courts which had not carried the day in the public arena or with the democratic authorities.

Brighton and Hove City Council, English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund), is taking every opportunity provided by our need for subsidiary orders to continue its fight to maintain its pier monopoly in Brighton.

This all quite legitimate under our arcane planning legislation.

In recent years I have witnessed masses of debate, points of view and opinions from both camps on the question of a football stadium at Falmer.

Having studied at the University of Sussex in the late-Sixties and been a resident of Lewes for some 20 years, I have seen the university quadruple in size.

Falmer was probably in the true sense of the world a village at the onset of the construction in the late-Sixties.

It certainly is not now.

I remember the words of my chaplain while at Sussex, the Rev Dennis Fotheringill: "Always believe in one God, The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end."

Perhaps an updated version should read: "I believe in one team, the players, the supporters and our faith. As it was for my father, is now and ever shall be, and in future for my daughter or son, an inspiration to our devotion and our Christian belief."

The building of our beliefs and dreams should not be denied, irrespective of where one prays - be it a church or stadium.

-Ronald Moore, Lewes