OUR campaign – Save Ledbury – is about keeping the magic of our town, ranked as one of the country’s favourites in a recent BBC poll.

What is at stake is not shopping – it’s about a sense of place, about jobs in the wider rural economy, about local, small outlets for food, about the historic fabric of the town, it’s about Ledbury’s soul.

People are intensely proud of Ledbury. And people who have lived elsewhere understand how uniquely special and valuable our town is.

Are we, like so many others, to become a ‘clone town’ of chain store multiples – or worse, a ghost town where half the shops are boarded up or turned into fast food joints?

At least four independent reports by three separate companies have reached the same conclusion that the Sainsbury’s superstore plans are just too big for Ledbury, and in the wrong place, nearly a mile out of town. The retail experts agree that there isn’t enough trade to go round to support a new vast Sainsbury’s, our current two supermarkets and the smaller shops in the High Street. Shops will close.

Out of town retail developments are universally agreed to be a bad thing for local town centres. Even Sainsbury’s regional development surveyor Caroline Vickerstaff said so last month in nearby Cinderford when seeking permission for a town centre store there. In Thame, Oxfordshire, Sainsbury’s said: “An out-of-town location is less likely to encourage shoppers to visit the town as part of a linked trip.”

Yet here in Ledbury, Sainsbury’s is arguing the opposite – in fact, remarkably, it will be good for the town.

Mary Portas, who knows a thing or two about shops, pleads that the interests of town centres should always be put first, ahead of out of town superstores because of their pernicious effects. And yet here now in Ledbury of all places, we contemplate throwing our precious High Street to the winds.

This is not a rehearsal. If this superstore is built, and the people who say ‘it will not damage Ledbury’ despite all the mass of evidence to the contrary, are proved right, then we will have achieved the miracle result that no other market town in the UK has achieved.

If, however, they are wrong, and we are right, then RIP Ledbury as we know it.

To Sainsbury’s we want to say ‘thank you, but no thank you’ for now and without risking this town, leave it to us Ledburians to democratically decide the fate of our High Street – in our own time.

RICH HADLEY, Chairman, Ledbury Opposes Out of Town Superstores.