The reason for the letter is the new nature reserve on Tynemouth sea front.

As a Yorkshireman with over 40 years living at Whitley Bay and Tynemouth I find this area a great place to live. The people are friendly. The area has some great countryside with wonderful coastal areas. Excellent transport systems are available and the road network is good. Great shopping centres are available for my wife with golf courses for myself. In our opinion we enjoy good weather compared to many other areas in Britain.

The one blot on the horizon is the local council. The council seems to have a great preference for fencing which councils in other parts of the country do not appear to share.

Take the housing estates built at Shiremoor, Killingworth and in other areas –houses built with the rear of the house facing the main road.

These have back gardens full of huts and greenhouses which are then hidden from the main road by different types of wooden fencing. On these new estates the strange thing is that the show house is usually built facing the road and without the fencing. Travel around Yorkshire or Cumbria and this factor of building houses with the rear of the house facing the main road does not seem to apply.

Imagine the Broadway at Tynemouth being built years ago in the same manner. Visitors and residents driving round an area prefer to see the front of houses and their front gardens rather than the rear with the offensive fencing.

Monkseaton Drive is a main road leading into Whitley Bay from the
north. The newer top half of the road should in my opinion have been developed in the same manner as the original bottom half with house fronts facing the main road. Better still built in the same design as The Broadway or Beach Road, Tynemouth.

We have a wonderful area of seafront at Tynemouth opposite the Beaconsfield car park. Now in the past few weeks new wire fencing has been erected which is included in the overall cost of £27,000 to protect the dunes and create a nature reserve. This is in the hope of attracting wildlife.

The many people who pay to park the cars on the sea front and just sit in them in order to enjoy the excellent sea view will now have to put up with looking through wire fencing to see the sea in the hope that they will be compensated for their loss of view by seeing an occasional moth or bird.

Any council wanting to attract people to its facilities would have transformed the area in front of Beaconsfield car park into landscaped gardens with paths down to the beach and seats available on the paths.

People taking their families to the car park could then have gone straight down to the beach with their children whilst leaving the grandparents to use the seats in the gardens. These could have been put in stone enclosures to give them further protection from the prevailing westerly winds.

This development in front of the car park would still leave large areas of the dunes as a nature park with the appropriate fencing if this is really necessary. Some local pop group should record the song 'Don't fence me in' and send the council the first copy.

NORMAN UTTLEY
Astley Drive,
Whitley Bay.

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