Paul Reach’s records of declining footfall in Dartmouth’s retail streets, Letters, November 3, are always interesting but may not bear the interpretation he places upon them.

His confident assertion that the town is in the throes of a disproportionate reduction in visitor numbers is unsupported by any analysis of exactly whose feet have gone missing in recent years.

To answer this question we have to consider a relevant but largely unnoticed restructuring of our town that appears to be well under way and is affecting the residents’ patterns of behaviour, as well as the attractions of the place to tourists.

This phenomenon is centred on the rise of Townstal as the location for new shopping, education, recreation and other service facilities, with the planned medical centre and new housing in the pipeline.

Increased investment in Townstal is welcome and long overdue in an area known to suffer pockets of deprivation. The downside may be undesirable impacts on the economic and social future of the historic lower town.

Mr Reach is wrong to imply that the town council is unaware of all these issues, including the knock-on effects of falling numbers on the streets and the importance of tourism.

One Townstal councillor reported recently that he now rarely finds a reason to go down the hill and another claimed that, as the oldest district, Townstal seems set to reassert its dominance of centuries ago. Yet it is the lower town’s historic attractions that visitors come to see and enjoy.

It is likely that the town’s neighbourhood plan will need to address this problem on the basis of sound research rather than hunch.

Whether a steep decline in visitor numbers is the only or even the main reason for the observed footfall reductions remains to be discovered.

So it seems to me that Mr Reach is exactly right to call for more direct evidence of trends in tourism activity in the town. But he would do well to obtain it before reaching a conclusion.

Cllr Tony Fyson

Above Town, Dartmouth