Striping HTML Tags From String, But Leaving Paragraph Formatting

I have a string of HTML (used for a specific purpose) that I'd like to
use somewhere else but as plain text. Rather than introduce a
specifically created plain text version I'd like to strip the tags code
from the HTML version. This in itself is easy, using a function such
as:

Function HTMLDecode(Expression)
Dim sTemp
sTemp = Expression
sTemp = Replace(sTemp, ">", ">", , , 1)
sTemp = Replace(sTemp, "&lt;", "<", , , 1)
'Repeat for each defined entity
HTMLDecode = sTemp
End Function

However, the difficulty comes when trying keep each paragraph seperate.
For example, the string "this is<p>my name" shows on screen as:

this is

my name

if I use the above function, it strips out the <p> tag and shows the
result on one line:

this is my name

I thought I could use something like:

str = replace(str, "<p>", chr(10))

but that doesn't seem to work. Can anyone help me replace <br> and <p>
tags with something that's recognised as "plain" text but will keep the
paragraphs and new lines formatted correctly??