It is encouraging to see Councillor Morley is championing higher architectural standards in Brighton and Hove (The Argus, November 21). Conspicuous failures in the past can be traced to two factors.

First, appointment to a planning committee did not presuppose visual literacy or informed training, which often encouraged a developer to pressurise his architect into submitting a bland design aimed at the lowest common denominator of committee taste, gauging that this would prompt the speedy issue of a planning permission.

The two town councils were short of elected design champions and councillors often avoided any possible contention within their ward boundaries, thus stifling creative design innovation. "Keeping in keeping" is a strangely late-20th-Century phenomenon and is completely unhistorical. Seldom did any of our forebears in earlier centuries think twice about erecting what they wanted, irrespective of the surroundings or any demolition that may have been involved, although I am not suggesting we should take this attitude today.

The second factor was the tendency to seek redevelopment proposals which were simultaneously best value for money and best architecture. You seldom get both in one bid and it is far preferable to commission a single good design and then invite redevelopment bids based on it, or vice versa, so dealing with the criteria in a sequence which gives enlightened architectural patronage a chance.

-John Wells-Thorpe, Varndean Drive, Brighton