Every so often your newspaper publishes letters from Spalding residents who are appalled, if not disgusted, with the state of deterioration of their beloved town.
I am very grateful that you do so as I completely share their feelings.
It is often commented upon that no visible effort is made by SHDC to do anything about it.
Although I find a lot of modern shop fronts completely unsympathetic to the historic beauty of the town, I acknowledge we have to be pragmatic in allowing such developments.
What is absolutely unforgivable though is the filthy and incomplete state of some of the shop fronts/signage, that decays the once gentile facade of Spalding into something squalid and grubby.
The question on my lips, as I expect is the same with every visitor to Spalding, is: What does the SHDC do besides rubber stamping every residential development possible to increase their Council Tax revenue? What do they actually do to make the owners look after their shop fronts? Do they have powers to compel the shop owners/landlords to maintain clean and presentable shop fronts? If they do, why do they not exercise those powers? And if they don’t, why have they not granted themselves such powers?
When so many other character towns in the area, such as Stamford, Crowland or Market Deeping manage to maintain the pride in their towns’ appearance, how can Lord Porter’s town be so debased by council inaction?
My point in contacting you is to ask if you can have a weekly focus on eyesores in the town and an attempt to stop SHDC being a zombie council.
I would nominate Baltic Foods on Winsover Road as a starting point.
The entire shop front, floor to ceiling was filthy and parts of the large lettered shop sign were missing.
The annoyance comes not only from the antisocial act of a filthy shop front but also the cumulative action of making the town not only an unattractive place to be for visitors, but also for the children who grow up here and thus will see nothing wrong with making the place worse with litter, graffiti and vandalism.
Residents may put forward ideas for other similarly poorly presented areas of the town.
Magdalena Podsiadly
Weston Hills
