I HAVE to smile every time there is praise for film locations set in this area as it was nearly 25 years ago in the early nineties that Carolyn Dunn (first chairman of Stroud in Bloom) went with me to see Alan Caig, then director of leisure and tourism at SDC, to put forward our suggestion to promote this very idea in a consultation document on tourism.

Just shows that everything comes to those who wait, eventually.

One thing which I hope will not come to pass though is the proposal by certain people to relocate to Stonehouse our builder’s merchants on Dr Newton’s Way so that ‘More suitable businesses can open there’.

Well, salt and coal came to the canalside wharves initially, quickly followed by diversification into building materials by Wood and Rowe one side and Butts on the other.

Stroud is already over supplied with catering establishments and shops selling decorative fancy goods, while smaller towns like Nailsworth, Stonehouse, Dursley and Wotton have their ironmongers for instance, not having lost them to the DIY superstores who do not carry such a large range of smaller useful every day items.

Long live our smaller market towns with their individual shops.

We visit them in turn each week, plus Thornbury with its garden and plant shop and Ledbury’s famous linen store, both situated in their main street and both Britain in Bloom prize winners as is Tetbury, which has public loos surrounded by its own garden created and maintained by volunteers.

One area in Stroud desperately in need of TLC by its residents is Chapel Street.

The redevelopment here won a design award in the early 1970s, it would have been better left alone and given grants to refurbish all the old cottages demolished as slum clearance, the same as those above and along Summer Street.

Both destroyed communities, which no amount of new-build can replace.

It is people who build communities over generations, not town planners nor architects.

Jenny Bailey

Stroud