Eastleigh'S army of angry allotment gardeners were on the march again yesterday.

They beat the same warpath from the Woodside Avenue allotments to the civic offices where more than 5,500 protest letters were delivered in more than 20 buckets.

This latest show of strength, supported by scores of town centre plot holders, came just days after the Eastleigh and Bishopstoke Allotments Association staged a wheelbarrow protest.

Then a convoy of wheelbarrows, piled high with 10,000 letters of objections to the local plan, converged on the Leigh Road council offices.

With the war cry of "Hands of our allotments", the protesters are stepping up their campaign to stop allotment land at Woodside Avenue, South Street and Monks Way being gobbled up for housing.

As part of the council's multi-million-pound redevelopment plan, cabbage patches could be replaced with hundreds of homes.

Yesterday the allotment association also delivered its official response to the local plan.

The association's campaign chairman Tim Holzer said: "This is not just about saving our allotments. This is about defending a principle.

"The association's argument is based firmly on national planning policy and government guidance which clearly emphasises the need to protect and enhance such open spaces within the urban environment, not to build all over them."

He said that evicting plot holders from these sites and moving them to alternative sites adjacent to the motorway was not only contrary to national policy.

He added: "It will destroy communities, render this leisure activity a nightmare and marginalise people's quality of life."

The latest protest was also backed by the Lakeside Area Residents Association (LARA), which fears that the development proposals could threaten the popular Lakeside Country Park area.

LARA chairman David Marsh said that building on allotment land had implications for the whole of the south-east.

He said: "We are all being invaded. Green land is rapidly being concreted over and we need to get the message back to the government - no building on green spaces and no building on allotments!"

An Eastleigh Council spokesman who received the latest objections said they would be fed into the local plan process.