Well that made my cat laugh just for starters.

Has she ever left the borough and been to Milton Keynes?

We do most of our non-food shopping in Milton Keynes.

I park 100 metres at the most from the fully covered brilliant shopping mall and pay £1 for four hours. It costs 80p for one hour in Northampton.

Milton Keynes has clean and attractive public toilets, allows no begging, skateboarding or bike riding in pedestrian areas and is spotlessly clean.

It is a pleasure to shop in, with a massive range of retailers, and places to eat.

The only advantage Northampton has is the many slot machine arcades which our councillors have allowed and Milton Keynes councillors have not.

If our council is serious about having a vibrant town centre like yesteryear, we need some bold measures to kick start it to life.

Try this for size, have a rate holiday for five years for all new shops opening within the town centre.

Reduce rates by half for all existing town centre retailers.

Persuade landlords to reduce rents to all retail users until the town fortunes revive and for the greater good of all, including themselves.

Provide free and cheap car parking, just like Milton Keynes and other towns that appreciate car-borne shoppers rather than punish them, like our own councillors seem to prefer and with the disastrous results for the town centre we all witness.

Have they ever heard of park and ride that some towns have had for 25 years or more? Why hasn't Northampton?

Make the town centre a pleasant place to visit, keep it clean, provide adequate toilet facilities, stop all begging, prosecute skateboarders and bike riders in pedestrian areas, and above all use the Market Square to its full potential, like Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham and Milton Keynes.

Demolish the Grosvenor Centre and start again.

It lacks light and space like modern shopping malls and looks old.

How to pay for all this you ask? Well if the Government had to build a new town centre for the 40,000 houses they wish to build in this area, it would cost hundreds of millions of pounds, so they should be able to facilitate with Government money to improve our existing town centre.

I believe there are such plans to improve the town centres of Towcester and Daventry and Milton Keynes town centre was built with Government financial backing and continues to expand. Why not Northampton?
John Wright,
Port Road, Northampton.

John Clare, our forgotten hero
Concerning your campaign for our forgotten heroes to be given the recognition they deserve, John Clare's life spanned one of the great ages of English poetry but, until recently, few would have thought of putting his name with those of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Browning and Tennyson.

This is no longer so. Why not join the John Clare Society (Membership Secretary, 9 The Chase, Ely, Cambs, CB6 3DR), which seeks to promote the wider knowledge, study and appreciation of his writing?

Currently a measly 10 out of a membership of 550 live in Northampton.
There is a memorial to John Clare in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Farther afield there is the John Clare Society of North America.

There is a third national John Clare Society in Japan . . . only six members but rapidly expanding!

When I was in Amsterdam a few years ago there were more Clare books in Waterstones there than in Northampton's Waterstones, which is some 100 yards away from the town library with its huge collection of Clare's books and manuscripts.
David Powell,
Bush Hill,
Northampton.

Poor record on civil rights
When Tories start telling us that they are defending civil rights (Mr Nicholls, Viewpoint, June 25), I think of how the last Tory Government sacked workers at GCHQ for belonging to a trade union.

David Davis has a poor record on the question of civil rights for gay and lesbian people.

I am pleased that the Labour Party has refused to take part in this by-election farce.

Mr Nicholls goes on to say in his letter "we still only have rather dubious official accounts of what happened on 9/11 and 7/7". I do not regard the official death tolls on 9/11 of some 3,000 and 52 on 7/7 as dubious.

What about the Bali and Madrid bombings, the failed attack on 21/7, the attack on Glasgow Airport, the failed London car bomb, the plot to bring down several aircraft carrying thousands of people? Mr Nicholls fails to mention these acts of terrorism.

Victims have civil rights too.

Mr Nicholls alleges that I want to see a police state. This sort of silly allegation is not worth any reply.
Geoff Howes,
Alliston Gardens, Northampton.

Freedom bought with blood
I have great admiration for Eamonn Fitzpatrick's decision to stand in Howden. All the same, I do not share his views over 42 days' detention.

It is all very well holding a terrorist for 42 days before charging, but the legislation is for detaining a mere suspect, or worse someone merely designated as a suspect.

At school we used to sing "Men of England who inherit rights which cost your sires their blood".

Does Fitzy really wish to fling that blood back in their faces?

Magna Carta is almost 800 years old and the rudiments of habeas corpus are even older.

Next year we celebrate the 330th anniversary of the Habeas Corpus Act.

The rights conferred by this act have long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject.

This is the reason why the Christian Peoples Alliance party, among many other organisations, is opposed to the proposed legislation.
Colin Bricher,
Local Spokesman, Christian Peoples Alliance party, Northampton.

Headline laugh
Re the Chron's front page headline of Thursday, June 26 (Gordon Brown: We will find cause), I had to laugh.

Gordon Brown, water? He couldn't run a bath!
Kevin Misan,
Clarke Road, Abington, Northampton.