IKEA and Shoreham Airport warehouse plans are farcical

An artist's impression of how the new IKEA in Lancing could look SUS-170130-152954001

The farce of proposing a huge-scale IKEA with a 1,000-space car park with 600 houses (which will take eight years to build) one of the only remaining green gap between Lancing and Shoreham followed requests for further plans for more large, commercial warehousing on the Shoreham Airport site, many metres in height.

Not only will we lose the green space, but also any views at all of the iconic airport or of anything in an especially beautiful area – once gone never regained.

Not only will all the local residents be smothered in pollution from the endless queues of cars trying to get in or out of the giant car park (see examples of Exeter and Reading IKEA car park gridlock), I doubt if anyone will get anywhere on time or unfrazzled.

All this, and then Adur & Worthing councils planning policy blogger Jennifer Ryan, posted online ‘pondering the importance not just of parks, but green spaces’, how they help us to adapt to climate change, ‘are good for mind and body’. Does she live on the same planet?

Is she even aware of what’s going on in her own council department let alone her locality – the picture she supplied was of Dundee!

How utterly insensitive and cruel, when all the things she spouted about were, after all, only what the local residents and the wider area have been begging and fighting for over the last two years of this nightmare scenario.

Councillors and officers, especially head of planning James Appleton: have some respect for your people.

J. Naman

Coombe Road, Steyning

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