Southern Water's proposal for a sewage processing plant that may be sited on land belonging to Roedean, the top girl's public school just outside Brighton, may be as large as four football pitches and as tall as a five-storey block of flats, directly facing the sea where the treated waste is to be dumped.

Others in the immediate vicinity directly impacted on by the new plant include Brighton Marina, the UK's largest (the new plant at the top of the cliff would overlook the Marina below), the Roedean residential district to the west of the plant and St Dunstans, the famous home for blind ex-servicemen (this would directly face the new plant on the opposite side of the Ovingdean gap).

It seems Southern Water is hoping to force the scheme through with support from the Labour-dominated Brighton and Hove City Council, whose planning officers have been in discussions with it for quite some time.

I attended Saturday's meeting about the proposal, where Conservative councillors made it clear they had been kept in the dark and given a mere four days' notice of a meeting on Friday, December 13, to hear the proposals.

However, the local residents and institutions are not going to take this lying down. They are already organising a formidable force to fight the proposals with all the resources at their disposal.

It will be a sad day indeed if this beautiful coastline were to be destroyed by an enormous sewage plant built on it, if the natural clean air were to be replaced with the foul smell of emissions from the twin chimneys of the proposed plant and the peace and quiet replaced by the background noise of a huge industrial plant serviced by large numbers of trucks and lorries choking the local roads.

-R Mojab, Greenways, Ovingdean