When will it end? This week yet another threat to Mersea other than the threat of substantial housing development. This is the announcement by Parkdean Resorts (Coopers Beach, East Mersea) with plans for more holiday homes to bring in their own words “an additional 4,000 visitors a year to East Mersea".

I am surely not alone in thinking what planet are they are living on. It comes when Cosways Holiday Park, also in East Mersea, is also pressing for substantial increase in the lodges on one of the most environmental sensitive parts of the island, next to the country park. There are already more than 2,346 caravans on Mersea as a whole. A vast number in itself.

Mersea is going under with the vast increase in visitors. Featured prominently in the borough’s television advertisement as the place to visit; promoted in so many publications like the Sunday Times as having a super coast; and also being so accessible from London.

No matter what planning the developers on these caravan sites say they will do, there is no way that their visitors can come without ruining the very thing that attracted them in the first place. Also, there is the fundamental issue that there is no regard to residents nor the pressure it brings on the islands already overwhelmed services.

Mersea cannot be allowed to develop in this way and I appeal to residents to fight all the developments that threaten the future of this island. It is death by a thousand pieces of development.

John Akker

Seaview Avenue, West Mersea