I was interested to see The Argus give a whole page, including promotional pictures, to a propaganda piece on Brighton and Hove City Council's King Alfred proposals.
At the very least, Adam Trimingham's article should have carried the label "Advertisement Feature".
Five words into his piece, The Sage of Sussex's bluster began: "The best architecture in Brighton has always been brash."
This is precisely the point.
The King Alfred site is in Hove and to ignore this is to betray either an ignorance of, or a contempt for, the historic symbiotic contrast between the two towns.
Trimingham states that "the towers are needed to finance the sports centre".
Yes, but it is only the council that deemed it necessary to spend £35m on a facility that will not even contain an Olympic-size pool. Nobody asked local people.
A perfectly adequate modern facility could be provided here for a fraction of that price.
Putting 450 flats (a new community of at least 1,000 people plus cars) into an area which already suffers access, parking and overcrowding problems would hardly be the best possible contribution to human happiness here.
Trimingham concludes that if both schemes are rejected "the message will go out that Brighton and Hove does not want exciting and controversial architecture".
This is nonsense. I would love to see an innovative and imaginative new leisure centre here, possibly involving some residential element to help finance it, but it needs to be in scale.
-Steven Skull, Hove
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