Having recently visited the proposed sites for the new community stadium at Falmer, I am greatly relieved that trees are to be planted to provide much-needed screening.

The architects are to be congratulated in denying stadium visitors a view of the adjoining lumpen Sixties university buildings and the noisy, six-lane bypass.

No doubt when those developments were originally submitted for approval, a very different planning regime applied in Falmer.

Indeed, the Downs themselves must have had a different shape, so those bargain-basement designs looked totally suited to an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and striding downsmen could gaze down in pride at these concrete wonders.

Thanks to the vision of those early planning authorities, we now have a village where exciting and whimsical design contrast is already the order of the day.

So we can have every confidence that a graceful, landscaped, new stadium, while rendering adjoining structures shabby by contrast, will look perfectly at home in such surroundings.

-John Cowen, Eden Way, Beckenham, Kent