Your feature (October 1) on the Mecca bingo hall, now demolished after only 20 years, made me think of another aspect of the energy crisis which concerns us all.

It’s taken some of the largest machines I’ve ever seen about eight weeks to destroy that building.

The energy needed for demolition, though significant, is tiny in comparison to the energy needed for the furnaces for making the original structural steel and for the kilns which made the bricks.

All now goes for scrap or to landfill and all that embedded energy is wasted. Surely that building could have been repurposed but no, developers will come to a cleared site with new steel, new bricks, new panelling, roofing and windows.

Across the road the former Plumbase showroom, a much older and rundown building, is now a heap of rubble. In Piccadilly, Swinson House, a solidly built 1930s tax office, is next on the list for destruction. All this might make economic sense, but if that’s true then economics is broken.

Anthony Day, Lastingham Terrace