AS is clearly the case with many of your readers, I have watched with amazement (and increasing horror) the almost disease-like spread of red tarmac, hideous signs and the Ryall bollard "slalom" on the hitherto pleasant rural roads around Upton-upon-Severn.

In the ten miles or so south from the M50 on the A38, excepting Tewkesbury, there are no speed limit change at all, whereas in the same distance north, excepting Worcester, there are eleven!

Kempsey, Severn Stoke, Earls Croome, Ryall, Ryall Grove and Holly Green (not to mention the Hanleys) seem to be competing in the size, number and ugliness of their road signs and the complexity of their speed limits.

The signs (some now defaced) spuriously claiming the presence of speed cameras are a particular eyesore.

Kempsey has no less than 18 and even tiny Severn Stoke has managed 12! And why does the previously particularly scenic small lay-by on the Upton/Callow Road have to have a forest of six separate parking signs?

The occasional radar gun toting policeman loitering in the hedges might well be better disposed as one of the badly needed village policemen, but no doubt the revenue consequences of that would be different...

What seems most extraordinary is that all this has happened with lightning speed close to an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and where local hospitals, schools, buses and Social Services have had to cut to the bone.

No thought seems to have been given to the probable increase of air pollution by vehicles constantly braking and accelerating and the danger and congestion of 'bunching' of traffic through these villages.

It would be interesting to compare the road traffic accident rate as between South Worcestershire and North Gloucestershire, which has not succumbed to this pseudo urbanisation.

Perhaps it's an attempt to soften us up for the billboards I gather Government will soon allow, or is it some new twist in the current rural versus urban "petrol wars"?

DR PETER HALL, Ryall Lane, Upton-upon-Severn.