SIR — May we please ask your readers to consider some of the facts regarding our purchase of The Promenade.

We are writing to set the record straight, given all the recent peddling of rose-tinted rumour, gossip and speculation.

The Promenade was built in 1905 as a private residence, and it has been used as a nursing home, a hotel and has been extended, but it was not designed and built as any kind of hotel.

The former Promenade Hotel lost over £100,000 a year in recent years and was already closed down by Livability and not trading when we collected the keys on September 30.

The Promenade Hotel has gone and will not return; that decision was not ours to make.

Last January Livability announced their intention to close the hotel down, giving almost nine months' notice that the hotel would cease to trade in September 2013 and was going to be sold.

This decision was made because Livability considered their own hotel a financial liability beyond economic use. Livability made their staff redundant.

Further, Livability have placed us under a contractual liability NOT to use it as a hotel with punitive financial consequences for us if we do.

The marketing of the former Promenade Hotel and its sale to us has been overseen by the Charity Commission, the government body regulating charities, and the sale has been carried out to their complete satisfaction and in full compliance with charity law.

We did not therefore buy a hotel or any type of going concern business.

The Promenade is now in part a home for our young family and we applied to the council last year to use part of it for holiday apartments to earn a living.

The application was made as soon as it was reasonably possible for our architect to draw the plans and prepare the required paperwork.

The property was in very poor condition when we bought it, but none of the work we have done required planning permission; the work has been carried out under the supervision of the council's building control officer and our professionally qualified architect in full compliance with building regulations and planning law.

We do not understand why carrying out this essential work to our own property makes us "arrogant".

We have no choice but to work quickly to preserve and repair our new home because we need to put a roof over our children's heads and pay the bills!

We have no other agenda, we do not intend to extend the property or change its external appearance, we do not want to concrete over the garden or build on the garden - we have just added some gates and fencing to keep our young children safe from the road.

We are very familiar with Minehead over many years due to family connections and we have wanted to live here for years.

We are so happy to be here and our children love their new school and the beautiful beaches and parks nearby.

We have made some good friends already and our "army" of craftsmen have done a fantastic job restoring our new home, we are so grateful.

Can we look to the future now please?

Whilst interested parties are fully entitled to express their opinions about our home, could it be that some people need to look at themselves and ask whether they are perhaps becoming an undignified nuisance locally and an embarrassment to Minehead nationally?

Their predictably venomous, aggressive knee-jerk opposition to absolutely everything will cause other investors to take their money elsewhere while Minehead decays.

Maybe it is time to wake up and smell the coffee, to relax and calm down after all that "tooth and nail" unpleasantness.

Why not join the long queue of customers at Costa Coffee and ask yourselves: "Did I misjudge public opinion on this one too?"

Justin and Caron Taylor,

The Promenade,

MInehead.