Several of your correspondents have tip-toed round the obvious but awkward fact that Great Malvern, almost uniquely among English towns, has a gruesomely steep slope to its main shopping street.

This means that only the fittest, most loyal or most curious residents or visitors will patronise Church Street shops.

Many potential customers are now more naturally gravitating to the modern, large and level shopping 'mall' at Townsend Way, with its ample free parking but soulless chain-store character, while others prefer the more home-spun character and compact, flat layout of Barnards Green or Malvern Link.

Great Malvern, for historical reasons, is strung out thinly along three roads, but still has the widest variety of quality shopping of the four Malvern shopping centres and the best supermarket within 25 miles. People are very fond of denigrating supermarkets but Waitrose possesses the best new large building in Malvern and the best sited car park.

Supermarkets are also open all hours, a fact that some people in the so-called 'caring' professions - medical and social services, education, local authorities, waste disposal, etc - might reflect upon more carefully than they appear to do.

Personally, I think Great Malvern would be in a worse commercial state than it is without Waitrose and the large central car park it inherited and improved. That there are too many charity shops is obvious but that might be as much to do with the distortion of the statutory rate rebates they enjoy, as with high rents or high rates in themselves.

In any case, they provide unwelcome competition to various local shops, especially when you consider some of them enjoy huge incomes from other sources. This is more like unfair trade than "Fair Trade".

There is also no proper central bus stop since the alterations to the Belle Vue Island. The taxi-rank - unnecessary, since taxis can set down and pick up anywhere and all God's children got mobiles - should revert to a bus stop convenient to the proposed and long overdue re-development of the Post Office site.

Another bus stop, a mini bus station indeed, could be acquired centrally by converting part of the public library land. That would cure the constant traffic hold-ups in Graham Road and Church Street caused by the present bus stops. It might also be a focal point for rationalising the current ludicrously complicated Malvern bus routes which take a PhD in local geography to understand.

Who knows, we might even get used to seeing more than three people on a bus!

C R Cheeseman, Wells Road, Malvern.