As a former resident of Greenstead, who spent 20 years on the estate, I can only speak with a voice of experience as to what Greenstead is all about.

First of all, please do not blame councillors, police, wardens and all those in authority, who are trying to make Greenstead a better place to live, for everything that goes wrong there.

Antisocial behaviour has always been the main issue, and reading in between the lines of letter writers to the Gazette, I’m sure this is the case.

So far, nobody has come up with all the answers, certainly not the churches.

When I lived there, people such as Nina Brown, vicar of St Andrew’s Church, Church Army captain Aubrey Bradfield, Joan Davies from the Free Church, Father McGrath, the priest of the St John Payne Roman Catholic Church, many councillors and others took an enormous caring role in the estate.

They took homeless people into their homes, fed people who were hungry, counselled those with social problems and so on.

St Edmund’s Hall, slap bang in the centre of Greenstead, was the beating heart of its large community, where jumble sales, bazaars, concerts and counselling all took place, including slap-up meals at Christmas for the lonely, poor, and all those who needed warmth and comfort at this special time.

Numerous people gave up Christmas to become voluntary workers on Christmas Day and it was always a huge success story.

Then students arrived in Avon Way and they became more problematic, although one can’t blame everything on them.

I believe they found it hard to integrate with the estate’s residents and certainly did cause a lot of noise nuisance when they were actually given places to live among the tenants there, and always got away with it.

My son and I were victims of such outrageous behaviour, which was never rectified and left to fester until we could no longer work full-time under such conditions, and had to leave.

St Edmund’s was eventually demolished – the saddest day in the history of Greenstead.

Are things better or worse now? Is it a better, or worse, place to live?

Leave it to the experts?

Most of them don’t even live there!

Yvonne M Holley
Vanessa Drive
Wivenhoe