IS it me or are other people shocked and upset to see our lovely Higginson Park transformed to a churned up building site?

I felt like crying when I took a stroll around the park on Christmas Eve, huge swathes of land now with enormous lorry tyre tacks is now fenced off at the town end, and further in, near the cricket field much the same.

CITP should be renamed VITP (Vandalism In The Park). Whoever was responsible for allowing this to happen should be ashamed that greater care was not enforced to minimise the damage.

I received an email, which thanked people for their attendance (I wasn’t an attendee other than managing to find a way to walk along beside the ‘light show’??? and under the ‘snow arch’, which was just a few snowflakes and nothing like the pre-show website image).

The email also said that the team had identified, before the show, areas that needed refurbishment and that at their own cost would ensure it was done; the areas in need of refurbishment may well have been caused by Pub in the Park earlier in the year for all we know.

Suffice it to say it feels like the council have sold off chunks of public park to commercial enterprises for their own profit.

Is this now going to be what happens? Twice a year the residents and visitors to our beautiful town are unable to access public spaces unless they have paid over the odds for tickets just to be able to walk along by the river.

It is not just the period of the events themselves but the lead up and breakdown of these events that affect regular users of our much loved park.

I’m not against commercial enterprise but it is disingenuous to hide behind their marketing blurb that it is good for our town and for the people living in it.

There are plenty of families who couldn’t afford to attend CITP but would have taken pleasure in wandering through the park during that time and over the Christmas period, as it stands it is not a pretty site and I sincerely hope that the CITP team have started the refurbishment and that within four weeks it is finished; if not I personally hope this won’t be allowed to happen again.

If there are other people concerned I hope they will make their feelings known to the council and to all those involved.

Jan Duckett, Marlow resident