CAN anyone out there explain how anything ever got done in Bolton before the National Lottery?

In fact, how did any worthwhile scheme in Britain ever proceed without lottery funding?

We report tonight on people who are mourning the demise of Bolton's Queen's Park -- the nearest park to Bolton's shopping centre and once hailed not only as the town's finest park but also one of the most stately in the whole of Lancashire.

Whether the park is now as bad as one regular user makes it out to be is irrelevant. What is fact is that Queen's Park has lost its glory and is a shadow of what it was 20 or 30 years ago.

Holding the occasional pop festival there isn't going to halt the decline. What is needed is consistent spending on maintenance -- in today's climate of litter droppers and wreckers, probably far more maintenance than it ever received in its glory days.

Even a council spokesman admitted the park was looking "sad" -- but the council's remedy for stopping the rot was predictable.

You guessed it -- the council is depending on National Lottery money.

So is it unreasonable to ask how Bolton or any other council looked after their parks in the days when the only Camelot anyone had heard of was King Arthur's kingdom?

The latest furore is just the most recent of many complaints the BEN receives about the state of Queen's Park. Many people are upset and angry at what has been allowed to happen and there is now a Friends of Queen's Park group.

The park certainly needs friends. Preferably with deep pockets. Trafford: Is it a threat? What's all the fuss about? JUST a day after our Town Centre Management Company was hailing the fact that Bolton had established itself as THE place to shop this Christmas, comes news that another old established shop is closing.

Businesses do come and go in a large shopping centre like Bolton, but what surprises us is that shops who are pulling down the shutters keep blaming the competition from the Trafford Centre.

We have done a straw poll around the BEN offices and can find lots of people who have been once or twice either "just for a change" or to have a peep at what all the fuss is about.

But we can find hardly anyone from the Bolton area who regularly shops there. Everyone prefers Bolton.