SO IN a few days the ABC will close. It will close leaving a city, which until recently was regarded as the cultural jewel in the crown of Lancashire, without a full time main-stream cinema.

The closure is not for economic reasons (not with 20,000 students) but because the council made an inept and apparently unenforceable deal with developers to provide a multi-screen. 

The ABC has taken the money and run, but there's no sign of the multi-screen, and probably never will be. Just another part of the removal of anything that might make the city attractive. The council's demolition crew, having finished with the Navigation wine bar, a fine eccentric feature of Lancaster life, may move on to destroy the Musicians' Co-op. There can't be a musician in Lancaster who hasn't at some time made use of its facilities, but more deals with developers are to be made. With staggering irony the same council's strategic plan proposes an "Arts Quarter" in the city

This is presumably a place where music might be played, wine drunk, and films watched.

Who is responsible for this insanity? Is it Hilton's Labour cohorts who, having been elected, won't even sit down and deal with council business?

Normally those who fall to turn up for work are fired. Or is it it Tricia Heath's Independents?

When I walk out of the ABC cinema for the last time, past the signs that say "Fanatical about Film" and "Investor In People", my-anger will be directed at those who have this desolate, chaotic and contradictory "vision" for Lancaster.

We have the right to know who voted for these disastrous decisions.

Jon Moore Kirkes Road Lancaster

@Editor's note. To be fair it should be pointed out that the council has yet to decide whether to approve the Chelverton proposals for the Brewery site, and as yet there are no plans to develop the land currently occupied by the Musicians' Co-op - but the co-op do fear they may become next on the developer's list and their concern is that their building may be sold off by the council as part of a wider scheme.