• ONE of the most depressing features of the prolonged and banal correspondence in your Letters pages about the Belsize village streatery is the shockingly low level of literacy in the adult population of an area of London whose name was once synonymous with high culture.

Think of Orwell, Kenneth Clarke, Keats, Michael Ventris, Gainsborough, Henry Moore, Mondrian, Gabo, Harold Craxton, to name but a handful.

And I fear this charge applies particularly to the well drilled claque of pro-streatery stalwarts whose letters share a remarkably similar vocabulary, content and peculiarity of expression: a coincidence improbable enough to make one suspect a common source.

TIM SALMON, NW3