HAVING recently moved back home to Darlington after years away, I’m beginning to wonder what on earth I’ve come back to.

So many empty shops, and even the covered market is half empty.

Our beautiful old library could be next to go, with a much-reduced service moving to the Dolphin Centre (in a scheme displacing the Register Office to the Town Hall and ‘necessitating’ a refurbishment of the Council Chamber).

The council seem only interested in speculating in empty office blocks and deals with developers to destroy irreplaceable green belt land for a quick buck.

The football stadium ruined one side of Neasham Lane, and can supposedly only be justified by wrecking the fields opposite with housing, despite a previous scheme to relocate the cattle market there having been rejected as inappropriate for the green belt!

And now there’s the stupid felling of trees along Carmel Road South because “there has to be a good sight line for drivers at the new junction”, when all it needed was sensing traffic lights to let drivers out of the new estate as and when required!

DBC are a disgrace, and are killing our lovely town with mismanagement and arrogance.

Shona Thomas, Darlington