Dear Councillor Brown

With regards to St Modwen plans/Swansea Gardens, as you are I am sure aware the Chichester Gate Leisure Park is an extremely popular area, with its multi-screen cinema, health club etc.

You must also be aware the car park is much too small.

If St Modwen plan for only 60 car parking spaces on the Regis Centre site, where are the patrons we are expecting to frequent said site, to park?

The town hall will remain, and I would suggest the 60 spaces will be taken up by staff/visitors.

I cannot see on a wet winter’s evening people parking in the Morrisons multi-storey car park and walking to the new complex on the seafront.

I realise there would be walkways but even so...

With the huge development at Flansham and at North Bersted, what Bognor surely needs for the next generation and also for the day visitors is something on the lines of a sports complex, reasonably priced.

Starting with underground parking, consisting of a swimming pool (Felpham Leisure Centre will not be able to cope alone), bowling alley, sports hall so sports may be played all year round, roller/ice-rink (this could be plastic ice as other towns put down at Christmas period), snow dome (our nearest is at Milton Keynes) this would surely bring in the crowds. Plus a dance hall/ nightclub and not forgetting a new state-of-the-art theatre.

Butlin’s does not have any of these, so this would also entice their guests to leave the centre and spend their money locally.

Please do not let our only two remaining prominent spaces be covered in yet more flats.

The other plans for Hothampton car park will leave how many other parking spaces in town?

Where will the visitors/bowlers of Waterloo Square park, if the council plans to destroy Swansea Gardens?

We should be encouraging these leisure pursuits, advertising them and charging so much less, so families may make use of them.

Every available space in Bognor is being crammed full of flats or houses.

Where are all these extra families’ teenagers to go?

They are demonised for congregating in the streets, for frequenting public houses; we need to give them close-to-home venues, where they can meet their friends and exercise.

Bognor Regis had many good things going for it – the pavilion on the Hothampton site burnt to the ground in the late 1940s, Princess Elizabeth Boating Lake where scores of children had hours of fun, even when frozen over!

Most of our historic buildings – the Art Deco bus station, the Beaulieu and Beaulieu Downs Hotels, the Kursal and the Theatre Royal.

We also had the very popular Esplanade Theatre and the pavilion at the end of the pier and also a large theatre on the pavement end of the pier, which now houses slot machines.

Why does St Modwen think Bognor needs a further 80-bedroom hotel on the seafront, when we pulled down those that we had, including the Rock Gardens Hotel, to build flats?

Surely with three Butlin’s hotels, the Royal, the Royal Norfolk, the Prom, plus those in Felpham and in Kings Parade, we have enough!

Other than Butlin’s, are they making a living, I wonder?

Do we really need another?

Your plans state that you want people to come to Bognor, not Chichester.

People come to Bognor Regis for our lovely seaside – can we not be like other seaside towns and cater for the young? Sandpits, boating lake for the little ones perhaps?

And to Chichester for the shopping and culture.

Bognor Regis is a seaside town, let us make use of our unique position on the south coast and promote us as that, a seaside town for families.

Encourage holidaymakers and day visitors, knowing they will have somewhere to go even if it rains!

Flora Rodwell

Tangmere Gardens

Aldwick