Professor Kayoko Muramatsu, writing from Japan (Letters, January 17), opposes the building of a community stadium at Falmer and says her own country has been spoiled by insensitive development.

Town planners in Sussex have momentous decisions to take, with the call for thousands of new homes coming while the Countryside Agency is designating the boundaries of a South Downs National Park.

These decisions will affect life for generations.

In the general area of Brighton and Hove, constrained as it is between the Downs and the sea, there is a desperate shortage of suitable development sites for important public services.

Debate goes on about incinerators and sewage treatment works; the lack of a coach and bus station is lamented.

Yet, in my childhood days, there was almost no building north of the Old Shoreham Road, no Woodingdean, Goldstone Valley, West Blatchington, Foredown, Mile Oak or Holmbush, to name just a few now-flourishing estates.

These were countryside areas which have given way to the pressure of increased population and rising living standards. There has always to be a compromise between where we live and where we breathe.

The public inquiry into the A27 Brighton bypass recognised that its unavoidable intrusion into the edge of the Downs would be justified by its becoming a barrier to further encroachment.

So far as the proposal for a community stadium is concerned, Brighton and Hove City Council will be making its support known at the public inquiry which commences next month.

The council is content such a facility is most desirable and has satisfied itself, after exhaustive research, there is no other suitable location.

The Falmer site adjoins the existing university buildings and the stadium would be required to be sensitively landscaped so as to add, rather than to detract, from "visual amenities" - to borrow a phrase from the planners. In an imperfect world, I feel the development would bring with it a benefit for which future generations would come to thank us.

(Perhaps I should declare an interest in that I have been a supporter of the Shrimps, then the Dolphins, now the Seagulls, for just 73 years.)

-P E Williams, Fairways Close, Seaford