Sir, - It was good to see that you devoted your leading article (Durham Times, June 27) to this question; you were quite right to say that the issue has taken on a new vigour in recent months. Not so good that some of your article was, if I may say so, disappointingly ill-focused and inaccurate.

You seem to regard the issue as part of the familiar tensions between town and gown, which certainly do go back a long way.

But this is a serious misunderstanding of the situation. ‘Town and gown’ ill feeling has generally involved students and local residents of a similar age, who resented the perceived privileges enjoyed by undergraduates.

But the current ‘problem’ is a quite different one.

The controversy about student accommodation is not in the least an ‘old, old problem’, and has certainly not been ‘around for almost as long as the university itself’. From its foundation in the 1830s until the 1950s the university probably had minimal impact on the residents of the city, being largely confined to the Bailey and Palace Green. Only St Cuthbert’s Society needed to house its students in a few scattered properties elsewhere in the city. Even the big expansion of the 1960s was mostly absorbed by building the new colleges on Elvet Hill, well away from most private houses.

Probably the first significant impact on the city’s residents came from the redevelopment on New Elvet which swallowed up Hatfield View.

No, the ‘critical issue’ dates from the 1980s, when first of all houses here and there began to be individually let to students, and then professional landlords moved in and started to collect their portfolios of dozens of properties, with the result that about six houses out of some 90 in my own immediate area remain occupied by permanent residents. And now comes the move to develop purpose-built blocks, which has become a stampede in the last few months.

We are talking here of a real demographic shift, and hence the ‘anger’ you speak of – though to say that it will ‘likely fade, if temporarily’ with the end of term is to ignore the fact that the university vacation will as usual leave whole areas of the city entirely uninhabited and deserted, which is depressing in itself and hardly helps the city’s businesses to make a living.

You reproduce the assertion that student numbers are expected to grow significantly in the next five years (an assertion constantly repeated of course by the developers); yet authoritative sources in the university insist that no such increase is planned. This extraordinary contradiction urgently needs to be properly settled.

Tony Kearney Mark Tallentire Gavin Engelbrecht Mark Summers Of the proposal to add the Kingslodge Hotel and Finbarr’s restaurant to the list of projected student residences you say it would be ‘sad’ if we were to lose them, as though that would be regrettable but somehow inevitable: the word is not ‘sad’ but ‘outrageous’, given that they are as you say among Durham’s greatest assets, offering a highly valued service all year round to residents and visitors alike. As previous letters have repeatedly pointed out, there is anger because the authorities which have the power to intervene, the university and county council, have done so little to confront the ‘critical issue’ or develop a coherent policy to manage it.

While it is quite understandable that the Durham Times should want to approach the question in a judicious way, it can certainly afford to take a more robust and forthright stance than it did in last Friday’s leading article.

SIMON SQUIRES East Atherton Street, Durham