First, I must take issue with Hazel Lowes letter (BFP, June 8), the Wycombe River was, up until the late Victorian period, always called the Wycombe River or the Wycombe Stream.

It was only about then that the name Wye was coined. 

One of the most commonly accepted reasons that Wycombe got its name was, and is first recorded in 799-802 as ‘Wichama’, derived from the Old English ‘wic’, wīc a dwelling; a building or collection of dwellings and the plural of Old English ‘ham’, Hama meaning ‘group of dwellings’  later Hamalet then Hamlet. 

Wic taken from the old Latin, Vicus or civilian Roman settlement with the later Germanic (Saxon) transposing W for V turning into the ‘wic’ and so on, thus ‘Wichama’. 

And now V Stevens letter, (again BFP, June 8), “do away with all the listed buildings…”. 

This was the attitude that stripped the heart out of the old town in the late 1950s and 1960s, that robed us of so many fine historic buildings in a search of “modernism” and what did it give us? 

Let us take a simple example, the High Street, look at Ask, the restaurant. 

Look above the first-floor eyeline and you see only half of the facade of a once fine Late Georgian town house, the other half, rebuilt in the 1960s as Barclay’s Bank, a typical modernist building very bland, with a tiled facade that pays no heed to scale, material pallet or context. 

Before this, the complete building ended it life as the offices for Wycombe Rural Council offices. 

Then turn around and look at the Asda Building on the other side of the road, modernist? What would you prefer? 

Wycombe before the drive for modernity had one of the finest period High Streets in the county if not in this part of England. 

Do away with our built heritage and you strip the heart out of history, for without a past there is no future. 

And now this builders/road construction depot on the Rye! Who thought of that one? 

This would desecrate the one sanctuary of peace in the traffic bound road system that surrounds our town. 

If we, Wycombe and Bucks are as short of money as both Wycombe District Council and Bucks County Council say why are we doing this anyway? 

Could this money be better spent on the provision of some descent low cost housing, mending the existing road system propping up some of the failing infrastructure or even opening up the river in the town centre? 

Anthony Mealing, Consultant Conservation Architect, Totteridge Road, High Wycombe