• AS a long-term resident and also vice-chair of the Belsize Conservation Area Advisory Committee, I thoroughly support the letters protesting at what one of them very accurately describes as “a hugely problematic vanity project” in the proposed new Pears Building (Royal Free’s planned building is a vanity project and it’s in the wrong, September 7).

The fact that no doubt it will provide a place for brilliant new medical services is irrelevant. They could be equally well placed elsewhere on the property.

And, as someone who knows the entire Royal Free Hospital surrounding area extremely well, how very obviously true it is that alternative locations could easily have been found on the premises.

What is more, with good architectural designs, it could beautify the Fleet Road side of the hospital’s enormous spread of rather haphazard “back building” development, facing that way, which could do with it.

But above all, Michael and Andrea Taylor are the unacknowledged heroes of the long local campaign to save St Stephen’s, which we all remember had been left to decline for more than 20 years into a disgraceful, squalid, state (Don’t let the Royal Free and the council damage our special heritage site at St Stephen’s, September 7).

Virtually single-handed and, to our great shame, without really appropriate gratitude and appreciation from residents or Camden Council or anybody, they soldiered on with an enormous restoration project and we now have a beautiful, usable, historic building which benefits both Hampstead and Belsize Park communities in several useful ways.

These benefits could last for another 50 years or more, providing the current “vanity project” doesn’t result in further “theft” of our ancient cobbled walkway next to Hampstead Green, or a magnificent restored Grade I-listed Victorian edifice sliding down Pond Street, cracked and finally unusable.

GENE ADAMS, NW3