This article (Ministers prioritised driving in England partly due to conspiracy theories, 10 January) confirms what I’ve long feared: this government believes its own conspiracy theories. The Department for Transport’s reaction to 15-minute cities suggests that there are no history graduates working in the department or, indeed, no ministers who discuss their work with their parents or grandparents.
I spent my early childhood in a 15-minute city: it was called the 1950s. Directly opposite my parent’s brand new semi in south Manchester was a greengrocer, newsagent/sweet shop, butcher and a shop selling “ladies’ products”, with a hairdresser above. Bread arrived in a van and the laundryman took bedsheets away to be washed. My primary school was a five‑minute walk away, and at the bottom of our road we had access to the banks of the River Mersey and surrounding fields and flood plains.
Around the corner there was an outdoor swimming pool. Another five-minute walk took you to Parrs Wood for fish and chips, a post office, a chemist, and a railway and bus station.
In the 1960s we moved to another 15-minute city called Cheadle. I imagine that Cheadle and many other suburban “villages” still have some of these 15-minute facilities. I guess many ministers haven’t ventured this far north?
Lynn Fotheringham
Over Kellet, Lancashire
• There is nothing new about 15-minute cities. The idea of reducing distances, and therefore travel times between homes and shops, etc, – if only for reasons of safety and convenience – has been promoted by town planners for decades, partly as an alternative to all-too typical, low-density housing estates where houses were miles from anywhere.
As a former planner, I recall that one of the design criteria of Cumbernauld new town, designated in 1955, was that nobody should live more than a 20-minute walk from the town centre.
It’s a sign, perhaps, of how much town planning has been sidelined in the UK that professional bodies such as the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Town and Country Planning Association don’t get the media coverage needed to justify such basic planning principles, which have been around for years, and rubbish the conspiracy tosh.
Martin Bond
Rugby, Warwickshire
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