COUNCILLORS in Accrington are up in arms over a comment made recently in the TV programme Heartbeat to the effect that Accrington was apparently less salubrious than Claude Greengrass's B and B. Nothing to get het up about, I would have thought.

However, if the councillors do take light hearted comments such as this to be serious then they ought to take a look at their beloved town after having removed their rose-tinted spectacles.

If they do, they will see a "Third World" town. The state of our streets is a disgrace with litter comprising mainly of cigarettes waste, ash, butts, wrappers, foil and fag packets thrown down by the previous owners who seem to believe this is non litter.

Then they ought to go and stand outside any newsagent, sweet shop, cafe or pub and look at the lovingly-laid decorative stone pavements recently placed at great expense, supposedly to make the quality of our lives nicer and then look down at the chewing gum covering every square centimetre, ground into those pavements by couldn't care less louts.

Even the lovely floor tiles in the Arndale shopping arcade are a victim of this unmovable substance. I could go on about the drunks decorating the benches outside the town hall, or the doped-up dopes who hang around the pedestrianised shopping precinct harassing terrified shoppers or the graffiti to be found everywhere or the shop owners who now make our streets look like a Turkish bazaar because they use the pavement as an extension to the shop floor.

Sadly, this miserable picture is not exclusive to Accrington, but applies to many of our towns. I have travelled to quite a few places around the world and made quite a few friends and I am reluctant to admit that I would be ashamed to bring many of those friends back to see where I live for fear that they would judge us all by the standards of the few. Where has our pride gone?

So, come on councillors, get down from your ivory towers once in a while, take off your rose tinted specs, and spend some of our council tax on cleaning up our town and educating the kids to be proud of Accrington.

TIM RHODES, Grange Close, Oswaldtwistle.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.