• NICKY Coates is puzzled about what’s behind the road works in Lansdowne Terrace and around Brunswick Square, (This is no time to be narrowing our pavements, Letters, May 7).

I cycle through that area frequently and I think I can provide an explanation.

An old-fashioned, quirky, attractive and (from my certain knowledge going back decades) functional road lay-out is being torn up.

It is being replaced (at great expense) by the road equivalent of an overweening glass high-rise building, a cold, straight-lined, and characterless space, out of kilter with the spirit of many of the surrounding buildings.

Worse still, traffic lanes are being narrowed in the area, making it impossible for vehicles to overtake cyclists safely.

Rather than being brave enough to do what’s really necessary – throwing private cars out of the area completely – Camden’s planners prefer to use cyclists’ bodies as a road-calming measure, in the form of organic traffic humps.

How many nurses’ and care-workers’ wages could have been paid for by the money wasted on this unnecessary and vainglorious road scheme?

ALBERT BEALE
Little Russell Street, WC1