No thanks, Aldi '“ too much noise

Moving here in 2014, I was doubtful about buying on the A259 – so much heavy traffic. But guess what, I read an article in the Hastings Observer full of promises from planning officers and politicians, that the huge thundering lorries would soon be no more.

That’s because they were spending £130 million pounds on slicing a huge new trunk road through the Combe Valley. And they kept banging on that they were doing this because of the urgent dire need to reduce pollution along the A259 – pollution which was so bad it was above legal limits.

So please, can anyone tell me how they now have the barefaced cheek – just 18 months after the new road opened – to say they want to put a massive new superstore on the A259, right where the pollution was worst? We should be told exactly when the plan for this huge store was hatched. Was it in fact always planned but they hid it until now because they needed to lie to us about reducing the traffic here?

Aldi, please don’t try to make our lives worse here. Pollution and noise from traffic kill people. Air pollution from lorries and cars will take years off the lives of people who live near roads like the A259. It’s 7.30am now and massive lorries have been booming past my window since 6am. I have double glazing, oak shutters and super-lined curtains, and I’m on the second floor. And it is still as noisy as hell. The air is more polluted that it was in my old home in London.

What’s more the A259 along the whole stretch through Hastings and St Leonards dates from the 1800s and was obviously never built to take heavy traffic, because as well as the noise, the floors in this Victorian building shake every time a juggernaut goes by. There is no way a new Aldi should be allowed on the A259. Surely the whole point of the new Combe Valley Road was that any new developments should be built there, and isn’t there a huge amount of land along it, marked for development, lying empty?

It looks in any case like there is going to be plenty of store space already free elsewhere if Aldi want to expand. It’s rumoured that Marks and Spencer and Next at Ravenside are both struggling and may be closed.

Why not open a rail stop at Glyne Gap so people can get to that huge existing shopping park easily and keep those stores open and their people in work?