Letter to the editor: Working with three successive London transport users’ committees in 25 years, I became familiar with the Bakerloo to Hayes plan. I make no apology for being better informed on it than some of your readers, councillors among them.

Lewisham Councillor Liam Curran appears to be yet another south Londoner obsessed with the alleged wonders of north London’s Tube lines.

Ask north Londoners what they think and the answer is likely that they put up with their lines because that is all they have, including two of London’s most unpopular underground lines.

Transport for London’s consultation paper has strange ideas about the area between Catford and Hayes. It thinks several square miles, already fully developed with good housing, industry and active businesses, will be ready for “development” and will need an intensive Tube service to stations that are mostly in quiet residential areas and not next to busy shopping centres, industrial sheds and busy bus interchanges. Does that mean a plan to tear down the buildings there now and replace them with ugly, antisocial tower blocks, like the new ones next to Lewisham town centre?

The original Bakerloo to Hayes plan was floated back in the 1960s. Like all Tube lines, it would have needed a depot for trains. This was to be on the gasworks land at Lower Sydenham.

Since then it has been filled with a superstore, houses and flats. There has got to be a depot for the Hayes line, but there is nowhere else a depot can go, so that means no Bakerloo to Hayes – unless they are thinking of covering the sports grounds of Beckenham and Eden Park with tracks.

Lewisham town centre needs the Tube. The sensible route for it to go after Lewisham is Catford Broadway (big shopping centre, lots of bus routes), Downham, Grove Park (Southeastern trains to Orpington and more bus routes), Sundridge Park, and Bromley North (major bus terminus), where the car park land could be used for a train depot.

Then the people in north Bromley who have asked for the Docklands Light Railway or Overground would get a worthwhile link to central London.

LAURIE MACK, Dene Close, Hayes