Not so many months ago, as long as they included restaurants and bars' in a project and called it "iconic" and an architectural statement', speculators could have built a Nuclear Power Station in City Square with full council approval.

Readers will recall Coun Andrew Carter's letter to your paper, asking us all to shut up, or we'd scare the speculators away. About 18 months ago, when I predicted that we would be left with slums and empty flats, he accused me of being disloyal to my city.

Well, Coun Carter, can we start talking to each other again? And Rod McPhee telling us all week-by-week how all this is 'good for us' – Leeds was never a "post industrial city on the skids".

There WAS a Leeds before Harvey Nichols. The city centre had a few toy shops for the kids (not any more). It had specialist stationers (closed last month, can't afford the rent increase). It had locally-owned businesses (forced out in recent years by exorbitant rents). At Christmas we had a Santa Claus for the children, in his Fairy Grotto. The shops used to have Nativity cribs in the windows – not now. For Leeds, if Christmas was not trucked over from Munich in 35 containers, we would only have '50 per cent off' Sale signs and an ever diminishing light show to look at – even the Salvation Army band seems to have taken flight.

Yes, there will be a knock-on effect of all this but perhaps we might look at the sort of city centre that Leeds residents want, not a city where we are ripped off by businesses charging Made-in-England prices for Made-in-China goods.

Thankfully, ugly concrete buildings, little more than wind tunnels, are no more for the present and Rod McPhee might discover the real problems of grinding poverty in this city.

Leave the fat cats alone, Mr McPhee, they have reigned for long enough!

Perhaps there is a lesson in the fact that the 36 bus to Harrogate gets ever fuller!

B Smith, Quarrie Dene Court, Leeds


It is to be hoped that the curtailment of city centre development is retrenchment and not retraction, and doesn't fuel a mood of over caution, nor encourage those whose city centre would ideally be part-garden centre, part-wildlife preserve and part "kiddies" playground.

Their "kissing towers" would be small enough to be "the footsie towers" and their "lumiere" a bloomiere.

The best of our architecture is either Victorian or Edwardian, which at the time was bold, expensive and artistic. Though traditional in concept and design, it was strikingly at odds with its low-level, ugly surroundings and what it replaced.

If as Kevin Grady (YEP, July 18) says, our councillors were "seduced" by "stunning" architectural proposals, their reaction was well-founded.

Whereas his recommended reliance upon "local developers" calls up memories of a certain Mr Poulson, whose seductive powers equalled those of Godzilla.

PAUL KILROY, Spennithorne Avenue, Leeds.