AS the tumbleweed begins to gather in Wycombe’s High Street so the town’s worthies have started to wrestle with plans to tackle the growing desolation.

Take away market days and it is a street clearly in decline following the closure of some stores and the departure of others into the Eden Centre. The opening of this £300m shopping mall was always going to create knock-on problems for the town.

It just seems that everyone was so caught up with the Eden project that not enough was done to protect the rest of our town centre. And with the credit crunch biting, it has now been clobbered by a double whammy.

So what we are left with? There’s Frogmoor – which wouldn’t look out of place in some austere, grey and forbidding remote Russian city – the Chilterns Centre, which is struggling, and the rapid demise of High Street.

The Eden centre is unquestionably a shopping palace that is a boon to Wycombe, but we are clearly left with serious problems for the surrounding streets. Only now, it seems, are thoughts beginning to turn towards this problem.

A meeting of the rather euphemistically named improvement and review committee of Wycombe District Council has taken a look at the growing crisis and come up with a grand plan to prevent the decline of the rest of our town centre.

Apparently to save the day we need several pound stores and a big statue at the bottom of Marlow Hill. I kid you not – and April 1 isn’t even until next week so it can’t be a joke.

The statue will be a ‘gateway icon’ at the bottom of the hill to welcome people to the town. It seems that someone on the authority has learned a new word. A couple of weeks ago the council was talking about a ‘gateway’ at the top of Marlow Hill.

Great! Let’s fill the town with gateways and draw people’s eyes away from the real problems. Thankfully budget constraints are likely to quickly knock the ‘gateway’ idea on the head.

So to the pound stores. One councillor on the committee last week said: “What we need are quick fixes like Poundlands and that sort of thing. I know a lot of people are against these sorts of shops, but they are what’s needed.”

Some funny old logic there. A lot of people are against these stores (i.e. they won’t use them), but let’s have them in the town anyway.

I think the committee is over-reaching itself to be honest. Surely what we need in these days of financial austerity is not pound stores – but 50p stores. They have them in Malta. Last time I visited one I bought a tin wind-up plane for a euro (then worth about 60p), but passed on recycled bottles of wine filled with various substances such as bleach and rat poison and a tiny label informing you of the contents.

Seriously though, those looking at this issue need to demonstrate a much more lateral and creative approach to the problem. Bring in a couple of pound stores by all means to plug some of the gaps, but there are not many businesses out there looking to expand just now.

The Eden centre has and still is bringing a lot of out-of-town shoppers into Wycombe so capture the market while we wait for the recession to ease off.

Do something constructive with Frogmoor and the High Street – even if it means taking the Covent Garden approach of encouraging street performers and musicians, the al fresco coffee culture and making space available at a minimal cost to bring in the art and craft brigade to offer their wares.

Such ideas would at least add a pleasant buzz around the streets outside Eden.