• CAMDEN’S designs for the Globe Tennis Club raises a fundamental issue for Camden Council – and indeed, all councils (Out! Fears that tennis club will lose its home, July 27).

While under enormous pressure to provide housing the council’s priority must nonetheless be to act in the best interests of those living and working in Camden.

Right now Camden’s development plan is not fit for purpose. There are no long-term objectives that will facilitate a balanced, healthy and fair development plan. The area around the Royal Free Hospital (which itself is expanding, crushing a small green space for more concrete) is high density.

Recently a large block of flats has been erected on a community space at the bottom of Lawn Road that blocks the light and privacy of the adjacent council block. The increased traffic will create yet more pollution and parking issues in a heavily congested area.

There are also no recreational spaces for children attached to any of the buildings.

What there is, up the hill, is the Globe Tennis Club, founded 63 years ago, by and still run by, volunteers. Their mission is to provide tennis facilities for people who could not otherwise play this “posh” game.

Every day children learn a new skill in a sport in which the UK desperately needs new blood. Every day children and adults get exercise outdoors at affordable rates. The tennis club is an oasis in a vast expanse of housing. Yet Camden Council are now threatening to demolish this wonderful and lovely facility for – more housing.

Cllr Phil Jones’s political-speak is double-speak of the first order. If the Globe Tennis Club is such a “marvellous facility” and if Camden is really “committed to encouraging sport and outside activity” then why is the council forcing on it a break clause which will threaten its existence and mean the loss of its grant from the Lawn Tennis Association?

To build housing over a “marvellous” sports facility that the council is “committed to” and which facility already serves existing housing is what the judges might consider “Wednesbury unreasonableness” as per Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948].

Cllr Jones must be honest as, after closing libraries and sucking our library stocks dry, after flushing £2.5million down the toilet on a bungled contract that it then sought to cover up, and with the Chalcots fiasco and the mismanagement of bungled and unaffordable repairs that has infuriated leaseholders, one has to question the council’s competence to make sound decisions that are in the best interests of the residents.

JOYCE GLASSER, NW3