WITHOUT a rethink by Monmouthshire County Council, it appears hard to see how another locally owned shop can survive.

Munday and Jones is the institution of a fruit and veg come almost anything one can eat bar meatshop situated centrally on Church Street at the top of the town.

Stand back and watch this independent business go, and we will be watching the beginning of the end of Monmouth being a shopping destination – tourism should follow soon after that – in spite of the revamped town hall and the surge in coffee shops – such shops mark Monmouth out – for how much longer?

On a recent shopping trip to Phil's (Phil Munday) I saw Phil being pulled to one side by a local council official. The issue is that Phil has a significant part of his veg set out in front of the shop within the pedestrianised street – apparently Phil is breaking the law by having the goods further out than one metre. Something of a final warning, the next action by our democratically elected councillors will be to remove anything of the shop that sits beyond the one metre invisible border.

When adhering to the council's rules several months ago, Phil found that on following the "rules" his business suffered a drop of 10-15 per cent – the kind of hit his business simply cannot afford.

The whole look of Church Street is enhanced by these kinds of stalls carefully laid out every morning and taken down every evening. They add to the antiquarian look of the street, and without them (as I noted during the Christmas shutdown for a few days), the whole street looks naked.

This is being done apparently in the name of tightening up on accessibility issues in Monmouth. Whilst I completely concur that Monmouth is tough to navigate if you are disabled, blind or partially sighted, picking on Munday and Jones' stall should not be the start or the finish point of the process. In fact without such shops, what is it exactly that people will be gaining access to?

Munday and Jones for me is the canary to Monmouth's mine shaft. Let's hope Monmouth's council are good at detecting the smell of gas! – Richard Maddrell, Llangrove.