Oliver Wainwright’s feature about Stockton-on-Tees (Bulldoze the high street and build a giant park: is Stockton the future of Britain?, 11 February), does not mention the man who fought valiantly in the 1960s to save it from decline: Franklin Medhurst, a second world war hero and visionary town planner, whose forward-thinking Teesside Plan was derailed when the self-interest of local politicians combined with the murky web of John Poulson corruption to wreck his team’s proposals for a better Teesside. Stockton would have been its cultural centre, with its much-loved Georgian and Victorian high street preserved for the enjoyment and pride of citizens and visitors.
Frank stood up to the planners and councillors who proposed to replace it with a cut-price concrete desert. He surveyed local opinion, and reported that the public did not want the town’s old buildings pulled down. The politicians’ revenge was savage – Frank was sacked. He never lost his idealism or activism – in 2016, when he was 96, his anti-Brexit letter to the Guardian went viral.
Hilary Cashman
Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham
• In stating that the architect John Poulson was jailed for “his role in a web of corruption, bribery and fraud across the north of England”, Oliver Wainwright perpetuates the inaccurate belief that the Poulson affair was restricted to northern England, a comforting myth for those who would pretend that corruption in the UK is not at the heart of our body politic. But Poulson’s business interests and corruption reached every corner of the UK (and beyond).
The biggest scalp of the affair was that of home secretary Reginald Maudling, MP for the London constituency of Chipping Barnet; Poulson’s first jail sentence was for bribing a senior Scottish office official to obtain contracts to develop the Aviemore resort in the Cairngorm mountains. The Poulson affair was not just a matter for the north of England.
John Griffiths
Newcastle upon Tyne
