Although I would not want to justify the government’s housing record, it should be remembered that between the 1950s and 1980s local authorities were demolishing thousands of slums each year, so the net increase in housing stock was nowhere near as great as implied by the graph that accompanied your article (Housing £2bn promise ‘just chicken feed’, 5 October).
Steve Shearsmith
Cottingham, East Yorkshire
• Deborah Orr (Opinion, 7 October) is right to praise inner cities, but there is another side for too many who live there. It takes me 12 minutes to drive from my home to the inner-city ward in Newcastle that I represent as a councillor. For each of those minutes life expectancy falls by a year. Until the inequalities that this dismal fact reflects are addressed there can be no room for complacency about the state of our cities.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• It could be that “Why can’t we cure the common cold?” (The long read, 7 October) is the wrong question. Colds are sometimes a reaction to stress, which makes the immune system susceptible to the virus. Vaccination could leave the immune system unable to have a cold and open to something worse.
Peter Adams
Edge, Gloucestershire
• Like Marie Patterson (Letters, 4 October) and Betty Birch (Letters, 6 October) I grew up in the 1940s, but unlike them I was in the Caribbean, where showering twice or three times a day was normal. When I came to England in 1946 and stayed with my father’s family, it was a shock to find that I was expected to restrict myself to one bath a week.
Chris Birch
London
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