Leave Whitby Harbour as it is instead of looking to build new office accommodation - Yorkshire Post Letters

Sinking £10m of government money into a new and very large, three or four-storey building in the heart of Whitby Harbour will come as a terrible shock to many Whitby residents and our visitors.

Whitby is the gem of the Yorkshire coast, but this particular site is a reclaimed tidal mud bank, where the previous EU-funded Big Tin Shed sank several feet at one end, making its internal crane useless.

That cargo shed was demolished, the view of Whitby was thus improved and additional car parking was created on Endeavour Wharf.

Not only are the foundations here dodgy to non-existent, but the Marina car park is now designated by the Environment Agency as a Zone 3 Flood Plain (i.e. highest risk) and North Yorkshire Council has yet to complete its report on coastal flood risks.

There is every chance the Environment Agency will say this is not an ‘essential’ building on this site. Surely the best thing to do with an empty Zone 3 Flood Plain is to keep it as a car park? At least cars can be driven to higher ground when tidal or river flooding is imminent – unlike a £10m building.

Our excellent Fishing School may need bigger premises but not this big. A whole secondary school in Whitby is already under threat, so why build another educational establishment? If a Tourist Information Centre is required, why not put it back where it was before Scarborough Borough Council closed it down and leased the premises as a café, now defunct and standing vacant for over a year?

If new office accommodation really is required, build it on the out-of-town industrial estate and leave our beloved Whitby Harbour as millions enjoy it now. If £10m has to be spent in Whitby, why not repair our long-neglected primary sea defences, the two Pier Extensions? Or is all that just far too many different Council Departments?

This proposal seems to be a vanity project from the recently abolished Scarborough Borough Council, based on some left-over plans from a now defunct offshore business, and yet another attempt to sneak a thinly-disguised office block into the centre of Whitby.

Our unique town centre is a potential World Heritage Site, which could yet be carefully planned and designed by the new North Yorkshire Council to be sustainable for us residents and for our visitors, forever.