AS a regular visitor to Swaledale and the surrounding area, as indeed my father Alan Archbold was before me, I feel compelled to write.

The story involving the mural on the gable end of York House in Richmond, painted most beautifully by local artist Jackie Stubbs (Echo, May 29), has once again raised the usual complaints from some local residents, aka Richmond Civic Society, and is now in the hands of the town council planning department.

In a letter my father wrote at the time that the town was convulsed by the Fleece hotel changing its name to Tanya’s Charms, he said: “Richmond must indeed be “a miserable little town, consisting of a population of affluent, dull, conservative, narrow minded church-going old buffers!” (HAS, Feb 11, 2003).

Whether Ms Stubbs had planning permission or not, in a time of such global depression and unprecedented misery and death, it leaves me stunned to think that some people have nothing more on their minds than to complain about such an uplifting work of art which is clearly aimed at raising people’s spirits in these gloomy times.

So if the ‘let’s complain about everything and anything that is intended to give people something to smile about brigade’, get their way, and the mural is removed, then Richmond, in my view, most certainly does seem to wish to promote itself as nothing more than the “miserable little town” that my dad labelled it all those years ago.

Ian Archbold, Newton Aycliffe