I WAS shocked to read that Bristol City Council has sold off a public park in Knowle West recently ("Scandal of selling off the family silver", Open Lines, September 11).

I am equally concerned that it now has serious plans to convert my local park, Packers Field in Whitehall, into a fenced-off athletics facility that would effectively render it inaccessible and useless to the hundreds of people in the Easton and Whitehall area who regulary use it.

This development is being proposed despite this inner city area being in desperate need of green space, and despite the council recently signing a Community Use Agreement which recognises that the field is used by the local community and consents to preserve the area for that purpose.

It is debatable whether another athletics facility is demanded in Bristol, and even if this is the case, surely inner city green space should not be destroyed for it?

If children and adults have no other environment but bricks and concrete, as is often the case in our inner cities, with no other entertainment but video games and television, and are trapped in overcrowded homes with no gardens, is it any wonder our cities are violent and drug use is endemic as a source of escape?

Green and pleasant land? Is this really the sort of environment we are going to allow ourselves to be fobbed off with?

Justin Dillon, Whitehall, Bristol.