Letter: Don't spoil Britain's beauty

Sir: S A Hughes (Letters, 21 June), who advised the Government that national controls on roadside advertising should be abandoned, dismisses fears of end-to-end hoardings in the countryside on the grounds that poster companies might not wish to site their hoardings there.

If that is so, why is such advertising so common in France and the US? Also, she ought to have known that the main source of roadside advertising in this country before the ban was not "poster companies" but petrol companies, who withdrew their hoardings voluntarily after a public campaign in the 1920s.

Dr AVNER OFFER

Reader in Recent Social

and Economic History

Nuffield College, Oxford

Sir: It was, as memory serves me, Ogden Nash who, many years ago, penned a succinct comment on the abomination of roadside hoardings:

"I think I'll never see

A billboard lovely as a tree

Indeed unless the billboards fall

I'll never see a tree at all."

BRIAN BAXTER

Bournemouth,

Dorset