• IN the spirit of hope, one welcomes the newly-appointed superintendent of Hampstead Heath, which is not a municipal park but an old stretch of Middlesex countryside.

I am cautious! Stefania Horne has experience in parks management and is reportedly vice-chair of something called the Parks Management Association; which will worry some of us.

Hampstead Heath, London’s countryside, is not park. Hampstead Heath is not a “leisure facility” to be increasingly turned to more high-margin commercial money-making for the City.

One notes that Anne Fairweather of the city corporation, talks blithely of continued “success”.

Does that “success” included, one wonders, the deplorable enclosure of the duck and fish ponds by charges – well in excess of the per capita costs – on swimmers who, under the 1871 Hampstead Heath Act, are meant to enjoy free access to them; or the related, indefensible, so-called consultation which, as complained of at the time, did not meet local authority best practice in terms of time allowed?

Will the Hampstead Heath “consultative committee” be ignored as it was then?

One hopes that it has not been defenestrated for offering objective advice to the city corporation on the subject of free swimming.

That was undemocratically ignored by the then chair of the of the management committee, Anne Fairweather, who owes her standing in our lives to an outdated, less than democratic, 17th-century voting franchise in the City of London.

One waits hopefully and watches carefully. Ready to comment.

To quote Lord Byron – a swimmer – one sees freedom’s flag blowing in the breeze. The City of London Corporation may not be the Ottoman Empire but it is Byzantine.

ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH, N2