59 View Road
Calistoga, California 94515 USA
January 13,2021
Local Plan Consultation,
Dorset Council,
South Walks House,
Dorchester DT1 1UZ
RE: Proposed North Dorchester Development – DOR13
Dear Sir,
I entreat you not to proceed with the proposed North Dorchester Development.
Your countryside is a precious heritage; once squandered, it will not return. Even more important than economic considerations, in a crowded and stressful world our welfare depends on recourse to natural beauty.
For us who appreciate England’s literature – your great contribution to the culture of the entire world (reaching even to me on the distant west coast of North America) – the destruction of the Dorchester landscape would amount to the desecration of a pilgrimage site.
I and family members went out of our way to visit your lovely region in particular because Thomas Hardy wrote of it so eloquently. Your Dorchester did not disappoint me. Indeed I found it delightfully unspoiled. Yet I would be unlikely to visit to see – a soulless suburban sprawl. No; we’ve plenty of them in California. But very little here in my state stimulates the imagination as profoundly as do Hardy’s novels about Dorchester.
Neither you nor I would pave over a memorable battlefield, nor build to the extreme margin of Stonehenge: even logical buildings make no sense if they disrespect the historical, imaginative environment. Yet the proposed development would do just that.
I am a member of my local city council. I know that when one course (such as DOR13) seems so inevitable… yet there is always an alternative that will accommodate the present and still respect the past. I urge you to pursue that alternative course.
Respectfully,
Donald Williams