PLANNING chiefs, according to a story in this newspaper, have "given the green light" to a development on the former York Gasworks site. This prompts me to wonder if they ever give any other sort of light.

No one who has kept half an eye open in York should be surprised that 158 flats are to be built at the site, off Layerthorpe. Every huge or seemingly inappropriate development that comes up for consideration usually goes ahead, even if there is a brief delay during which the planners nervously try out their red light button, just to check it still works, before pressing the green one.

Planners in this country say yes to all sorts of horrible buildings, here in York and elsewhere. The gasworks flats don't do much for me, at least not if the architects' drawings published in The Press are any guide. Six blocks of flats are to be built, in five storeys and with small balconies outside the windows. The buildings appear to be pointed at one end, bringing to mind a grounded ship.

Anyway, that's what York is going to get more flats. Perhaps these flats are no better or worse than all the others. That is besides my point. What I'd like to suggest, and it's a hell of a brave idea, one so momentous in scope and vision that I'm feeling quite excited at having thought of it, is this: why didn't anyone think and here comes my mind-trembling big idea of building terraced houses instead?

Look around any of the residential areas close to the centre of York and you will see hundreds of roads containing terraced houses, some grand and sweeping, some on the tiny side and most somewhere in between.

I live somewhere in between myself in between in size and in between two other houses. Ours looks small from the front, but inside it has four bedrooms, a front room, a dining room (or noisy teenage computer room), a kitchen, a garden extension, a shower room and a bathroom, plus a small garden at the back, complete with wooden shed.

It is an ordinary house, but a nice one, and bigger than when we moved here, thanks to inviting builders in to upturn our lives three years ago.

Terraced houses have a lot going for them. Many of those in York were built by the Victorians or Edwardians and, with modifications along the way, are still going strong, and will probably still be doing their stolid business long after all the "executive" flats in the city have started to crumble. Incidentally, is anyone else surprised at the number of executives there are in York, all needing an expensive but pokey place to live?

With imagination and architectural bravery, modern terraces could be better than the ones we are used to. One problem is that terrace streets are dominated by cars. Modern terraces could hide the cars at the back, or underneath even, leaving the front pleasant and free of traffic.

They could be designed environmentally, saving on heat and power. They could be exciting, convenient, comfortable places in which to live, self-contained yet sociable too.

But it won't happen because putting up identikit flats, all designed on the same lines, is cheaper, easier and all we can manage these days, which is little short of a tragedy.

Talking of planning, I would like to add my own amazement to the news that City of York Council plans to knock down the Peasholme Centre and build it somewhere else, quite possibly at Monk Bar, which is in a conservation area.

I declined to sign a petition against moving the Arc Light to Union Terrace car park, partly because I felt it had to go somewhere. But putting two such centres for the homeless in the same part of York, barely half a mile apart, seems like madness especially when there is nothing wrong with the Peasholme Centre except that it stands in the way of the council's grandiose plans for its new home.

Sadly, I expect the planning chiefs have their fingers hovering over the green button already.