SiIR – Phillip Bird’s question (Store snobbery, T&A, 27 April) deserves an answer. Tesco’s UK retail profits have been falling while Sainsbury’s have risen.

This has nothning to do with inverted snobbery. It is because, nationally, people are finding it a more pleasant experience to shop at Salisbury’s.

I opposed Tesco’s application to build in Bingley because there is a world of difference between the effect of a supermarket store at the edge of the town centre and one right in the middle.

Tesco scuppered their own chances of getting the B&B site because in their application for the former cattle market, they went out of their way to explain why the B&B site was unsuitable for their purposes.

Sad to relate, Sainsbury’s have now insisted that the mature trees that grace the site have to go too and, worse still, they propose, when they get round to it, to replace B&B’s monstrous castle with a stark metal and glass box half its size and just as ugly.

In other places, Sainsbury’s developments have won awards for sensitive appropriate architecture that enhanced the townscape. Surely Bingley deserves better.

Arthur Arnold, Beech Street, Bingley