You report that NewRiver, owners of the Ross Road site of The Broadleys public house leafleted the local community on December 19. About what? Prospective closure of that asset of community value and conversion into a Co-op that would compete against Holme Lacy Road Co-op;

The Broadleys is one of just three remaining pubs in the south of the city.

NewRiver and a supermarket chain seem motivated by road-building-related opportunistic greed over the community spirit embodied by Broadleys customers. A ‘sign of the times’ in the new millennium while national housing shortage excuses profiteering at government ‘Help to Buy’ scheme expense, global money laundering via UK housing market and multiple home ownership inequality are overlooked?

In the noughties, the popular and viewer-participatory BBC2 tv-programme ‘Working Lunch’ serially reported pubs being sold off at an alarming rate as brewing companies found real estate more profitable than servicing such community hubs. How many pubs in the south of Hereford have closed since the BBC shut down the ‘community’ that was its Working Lunch audience in 2010?

Also in the noughties, an outer London MP reported to a meeting on the Localism Bill that supermarket chains rather than local shops profited from the building of bypasses.

Broadleys customers’ community spirit is shown in more than carol singing events. After a September 2017 Broadleys visit for a half-pint and toilet visit following a Holme Lacy Road Co-op shop, the wallet I’d mislaid was behind the bar on my return.

That was ‘cooperative’.

Alan Wheatley

Hereford