Concrete example of institutional vandalism at the seaside

IT will be with considerable dismay, no doubt, that many Yorkshire Post readers who have been visitors to the town, will learn of the latest sea defence proposal at The Spa in Scarborough (Yorkshire Post, December 7). A proposal that threatens to permanently scar one of Yorkshire’s and Britain’s finest seascape landmarks and beaches.

Once again, the marine conservation group the Sons Of Neptune have had to step in to police the seemingly interminable, misguided excesses of Scarborough Borough Council.

In the recent past, the authority’s wholly irresponsible endorsement of the dumping of raw, untreated sewage into the town’s bathing waters, was an assault on the very future commercial viability of Scarborough as a seaside resort.

Now in 2011, yet again the beaches and what invaluable seafront Victorian architectural heritage that remains are deemed fair game for another form of unfettered institutional vandalism.

Within the very immediate environs of The Spa, a Grade II listed building and one of Scarborough’s unique Victorian buildings, it is astounding that there is now a very real potential threat of it being permanently disfigured by a vast, erroneous concrete ramp.

It is a gross offence to the very architectural integrity of The Spa.

Sadly, there is hardly a part of Scarborough’s main built environment that has not irrevocably suffered from the reprehensible destruction of architectural heritage, over-zealous insensitive development and all too frequent poor quality design over recent decades.

Is The Spa and the South Bay beach to be condemned in being added to the town’s shameful list of avoidable architectural disasters?

As owners of The Spa, the authority has a fundamental duty to act as a responsible custodian.

That integral responsibility seems due to be abandoned as in even suggesting such a scheme, it appears that the local authority has a prevailing inherent hatred towards its own civic legacy. The result of which threatens to further degrade Scarborough’s architectural inheritance and that of its tourist beaches.

Furthermore, where is the evidence to substantiate the authority’s claim that “The sea walls in front of The Spa have reached the end of their serviceable life”?

Without that evidence, the scheme is a wholly unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem.

If it is irrefutably proven that indeed measures are required to bolster the existing sea wall, then the solution is plainly obvious to anyone with even the most basic threshold of common sense.

The Spa sea wall would simply be a restoration project.