Dismayingly, the policy and resources committee of Brighton and Hove City Council favoured the making over of the Hove gasworks site to a developer who plans a superstore for Tesco.

It's a quick fix but does it fix? There is talk of shifting a school and of cosmetic detail but the upshot is a superstore, something inherently dull, a place to escape as soon as possible - sent on one's way by a dictated farewell. Developers are not philanthropists. There's a price to pay at the checkout for these guys' apparent donations.

Imagination could yet produce something distinguished. The public's being turfed out from council discussion of the site's commercial aspects suggests something questionable: That is, the use of a compulsory-purchase order not only for our money to benefit a commercial developer but also to cause diverse environmental blight.

It is apparent from the meeting's "pink" papers - not made available to the Press or the general public - that, for starters, some fine trees will go the way of the wonderful flint wall on Church Road.

To my mind, heartbreaking, very West Brighton. People love that wall. We can do better than knock it down - we can keep it.

Tesco and, indeed, Sainsbury left Hove when it suited them. Only the Co-op stayed put when it could so easily have upped and concentrated upon its Nevil Road superstore. It deserves our thanks, not a smack in the face.

Quite rightly, one applauds Councillor Sue John for volunteering - halfway through the meeting - that she had an interest to declare, that she is chairman of the Sussex Co-op. One could add that the Co-op has sponsored a campaign leaflet by Ivor Caplin, who has long urged that Tesco move in.

I say this in no spirit of rancour but simply to suggest this site should not benefit one entrepreneur, who will doubtless make noises about job-creation (shelf-filling round the clock at £4 an hour). Instead, here is a great opportunity to bring real benefit to a ward which Councillor Warman-Brown called one of the most deprived in the city.

In the mind's eye I see a socially-inclusive series of Lanes-like shops, run by local people, amid a small park, in which the surviving buildings are given over to various purposes - even a small cinema, a community hall, perhaps an open-air ice rink (visitors could use the current car park).

And, should there be need of a bigger supermarket in so small an area, what could be easier than to devise a way of expanding the Co-op?

The details need more work, of course - more work than was given to passing the current plans on the nod.

But, hey, all this is but to proffer some of that vision-thing which we were told would be the stock-in-trade of a directly-elected mayor on £100,000 a year - and here am I giving it for nothing. I must be in the wrong business.

-Christopher Hawtree, Westbourne Gardens, Hove