You might have seen it: the half-timbered, faux-Elizabethan building over the road from the kebab shop.

As a building in it's own right, it's very nice. But that's it. Why did the architects have to hark back to a former age? I guess it was to preserve the character of the Market Place. I take that to mean bubble-wrap it and oppose all change.

This is the same sort of attitude that led some Devizes Guardian and Conservative Town councillors to try to throw out plans for some of those blue bars to be put up in the Market Place for people to lock their bikes to. "We need more detail", they whined. Despite the fact that we were given plans, photographs and drawings. But I digress.

Of course development in our premier location should be sympathetic but that doesn't mean it needs to be homogenous. Many generations have added and contributed to the Market Place in their own way, and mostly by celebrating their own times. There's an old German saying that translates roughly as "he who does what his father did, doesn't".

I'm pleased to say that the architects and planners are being bolder in Snuff Street.