Whitbread Plc/Premier Inn are back in town.

Their first incursion, last year, proposed the development of a 64-bedroom budget hotel in a conservation area in the historic core of Ambleside. Here they were intent on the destruction of a fine Georgian house, where the children of Wordsworth and Coleridge were schooled.

After prolonged local opposition, this unconscionable scheme was defeated.

Now Whitbread/Premier Inn has surfaced again with another proposal which will divide the town. An 88-bedroom hotel with even more car parking, built on the last remaining greenfield site in the town, a floodplain with significant archaeological potential, is proposed with the ‘offer’ of 24 social rent and six shared ownership units and ten ‘affordable’ houses.

Their sweetener of ‘affordable’ housing comes with a despicable caveat: permission denied for a hotel means no housing. Affordable secure local housing is desperately needed in Ambleside.

Notwithstanding the myriad objections that will be forthcoming, Ambleside simply doesn’t need or want a Premier Inn or any chain hotel in the town - or anywhere in the Lake District National Park.

The Lake District National Park Authority should adhere to its most important statutory law, the Sandford Principle, which demands that they should “attach the greatest weight to the purposes of conserving and enhancing the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the national park.”

The top three hotel chains, locked in an aggressive battle for ‘market growth’, have drawn up target lists of priority destinations: all are within or on the edges of our National Parks. If this proposal succeeds, an ominous and detrimental precedent will have been set.

The Lake District is a victim of its own popularity. Instead of celebrating and promoting the authentic wonder of what is here, the agencies responsible for its conservation and promotion have imported inappropriate commercial mimetic add-ons.

Evidence of these insensitive interventions in the ‘cultural landscape’ of the Lake District has consistently compromised its recurrent bids for WHS status.

The Lake District Partnership’s continuing inability to reconcile the incompatibility of its drive for so called ‘adventure tourism’ with the enjoyment of the landscape and its ambience will undoubtedly continue to undermine these ambitions.

Russell Mills

On behalf of Future Ambleside