Wyre Forest District Council has been tasked by Central Government to facilitate the provision of several thousand new homes over the next 10 years. Coincidentally, it is faced with the tremendous problem of re-developing redundant retail buildings in the town centre. These overlapping issues can only be solved by making Kidderminster a more desirable place to live, and that can only be done by rebuilding the community in the manner of similar sized ‘transition towns’, a long term purpose for which the present council, with its uneasy relationship with government, its predilection for top- down projects, its extraordinarily weak instincts for the principles of democracy, and on the evidence, not much sense of design or style, seems singularly ill-prepared.

R Goodall

Bewdley