Who could resist the freight hub hotel?

THERE is something about development proposals that brings out the cynic in me.

I was intrigued to read about the freight hub (Chronicle, April 9) being mooted for a large lump of Kent countryside east of Borough Green.

This would apparently involve turning over 250 acres of the Green Belt to the building of warehouses and places for containers to spend the night on their way from Brussels to Barrow-in-Furness.

Quite apart from the politics and the aesthetic issues, I was struck by the "benefits" being used to seduce us into thinking that this scheme is a good idea.

For one thing, we're told that the project "would provide employment for hundreds of local people".

Now, I can't think of many enterprises in the area that provide employment for hundreds of local people these days, or are ever likely to since Fort Halstead turned its back on the war business.

The pattern seems to be that new developments kick off with a bunch of strangers doing their best to charm residents, and within about a year the whole thing is being run by two men and a Doberman Pinscher.

Take Sevenoaks Station. Not so long ago the concourse was awash with businesses and there were real live human beings around to check your ticket at the gate or run down the platform slamming the train doors shut.

These days everything is automated. The place is staffed by about 2.6 people, and it can only be a matter of time before they send one of those long-suffering men behind the ticket windows on a Customer Service course so he can man the coffee shop on slack afternoons and reduce the headcount by another percentage point.

Just across the road, the BT building seems to house about a dozen employees in a space designed for, well, hundreds.

I'm sure the developer nibbled the district council's ear with promises of local employment, but it looks to me as if the only people to make money round there were the traffic light installation company and the team who brought the big swingy ball to divest us of The Farmers.

So, call me an old cynic, but I have my doubts whether the Freight Interchange would provide employment for more than a couple of dozen people after the first flush of excitement.

What's more, they'll only be "local" if we stretch the term to include Thanet and the Medway towns, which is where an awful lot of our workers actually live.

Another word leapt out of the proposal. Along with the distribution park, aggregates depot and commercial buildings, they propose to build a hotel. Now, I know that something in the Sevenoaks administrative psyche craves another hotel.

There are constant rumours of this office block or that unused space becoming a hotel, as if the presence of a Marriott or a Travelodge will somehow give the town some gravitas.

But a hotel in a freight hub? Are they having a laugh? Who's going to stay there – people with a passion for Norbert Dentressangle lorries? Trainers of Doberman Pinschers? Truckers?

And, unless my eyesight's wonky, isn't there a hotel there already?

"Sevenoaks: Freight Gateway to the UK."

Whatever next?