SIR - I have just returned from a walk down Dursley's Long Street, feeling sad and angry at the state in which the offices of the old R A Lister company have been allowed to fall.
Once the Littlecombe site is re-organised their facade would be the only remaining visual link with the hey days of the company that played a major and vital role in the history of our town.
The wool cloth trade collapsed in the 1830s, causing such an employment vacuum that the population of Dursley dropped by some 25 percent and poverty became rife.
In 1867 Robert Lister began repairing farm equipment in a small water mill in Water Street with two employees - a man and a boy. Through his dynamism, and that of his wife, his company grew, the town began to prosper again and a 100 years later, when employees numbered some 4,000, it could in truth be said that nearly every household in the area had a link with Lister's.
In the 1890s R A Lister bought up the area at the bottom of Long Street, called Troy Town, and, after clearing it, built new offices, the smoke-blackened front of which is in such dire straits at this moment.
For decades, in these offices, new products were designed and orders for them received from the world over. From these same offices salesmen went to all corners of the globe. The name of Lister became synonymous with high quality and reliability internationally and the name of Dursley well known. Many a holida maker now returning from distant parts has tales of having seen Lister equipment in use or in museums.
To me it is unthinkable that the town should lose this reminder of a firm, once so central to its prosperity - and would there not be supreme irony if in the year the town opened its heritage centre an important part of that heritage was allowed to crumble into dust?
I am no structural engineer but it does seem to me that it cannot be beyond the wit of modern technologies to save this facade. I just hope that the will is there to do what is necessary.
David Evans, Kingshill Park, Dursley
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