by Tom Fort
After four years of toil and drudgery we staggered over the finishing line. We submitted our draft plan to the examiner, an independent professional planner, who ruled that, with a few tweaks, it was fit for purpose. It thus became a Neighbourhood Plan, and on 29 September 2016 – a red-letter day for us, if no one else – the village voted on it in a referendum. A final spasm of energy on the part of our working party – leaflet drops, posters banged into the verges of the main through routes, letters to the local paper and, on the day itself, the curious sight of yours truly on a bicycle wobbling along the streets with a megaphone urging the populace to exercise its democratic right – helped secure a hugely satisfying result. Almost half the registered electorate of 2900 took the trouble to vote. Of those, 94 per cent approved the plan. After the returning officer announced the figures, we sipped champagne, dazed by the outcome.
Our plan thus became part of the planning process. Under law, it carries weight in determining applications – no one yet knows how much, but that will become clearer as developers press to build houses on sites that are not in it. The future remains clouded by uncertainty. But at least we can console ourselves in the knowledge that we have done all we could have done. The prize all along has been to give those who know the village best and who value it the highest a significant say in what happens to it. Our NDP will do that, if it is allowed to. For me, it has been comparatively easy to remain positive about what has been an absurdly extended and gruelling exercise, because I have done the least towards making the plan happen and therefore had the least to lose if it fell on its face. At times of general despair I said to the others that if we were able to get the houses built where we wanted – even if there were more of them, and some of them were bigger than we might wish – the toil and tribulation would have been justified. If we can see off the likes of Gladman and the other development companies – who would happily see our countryside annexed by bricks and tiles and concrete and tarmac and think only of how much money they had made – it will have been worth it.
If we can keep the village as a village, it will have been worth it.
22
SECRETS OF SURVIVAL
Sonning Common and Beyond
I like living in my village and always have done. It suits me and my wife, and our children have grown up here and feel at home. We have made good friends and there are abundant small pleasures around: the walks, the rides, the pubs, the shops, the accidental encounters and chats.
The fondness I have for it goes to a deepish level. I have grown to care about the place. I think that is because I have been able to get to know it, to comprehend it as a whole entity. I am on nodding terms with all of it, and with the lanes and paths and fields and woods that comprise its setting.
It has often been said that with the post-war agricultural revolution and the breaking of the link between the village and the working of the land, the relationship between the settlement and its surroundings was destroyed. This is simply not so. There are countless villagers like me, for whom walking and cycling – just being – in the countryside is a crucial part of life itself. Of course the relationship is different in its nature to that between the peasant or agricultural labourer and the fields he worked all his life, in that it is not a matter of life and death and survival. But the close embrace of the open countryside is as essential to the village as it ever was. That is why attacks on it arouse such passionate feelings.
My village is large and diffuse as villages go, but still small and compact enough to be knowable. It is also big enough to work as a community, to have life and meaning. Its schools, shops, pubs, facilities and amenities work as vital organs, pumping blood, enabling movement and activity. Because it is not pretty or old, the heavy hand of the conservers and preservers has been restrained, and it has been able to grow and sustain itself. The results are not elegant, but in the village looks count for less than life.
Inevitably that life is limited, even somewhat boring. This is a deficiency felt with particular acuteness by teenagers. There is no culture, no night- or café life, no buzz. The virtues – peace, quiet, security, cleanness, services, connections – are not exciting virtues. But you do not grow up living in a village, or come to live in one, expecting excitement.
In the course of researching and writing this book I have studied village life past and present as closely as my mental powers permit. I have read extensively about the past, and have spent much time exploring individual villages and talking to village people about the present. It is time to set down some of the lessons I have learned.
First and foremost, the village as a model of communal living is secure. It does not suit everyone, because village life is generally uneventful. But a substantial proportion of the population – mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly comfortably off economically – find that it suits them. There is no reason to believe that will change.
Baker’s, Blounts Court Road, Sonning Common
All villages used to be working villages, more or less self-contained and self-sufficient. That, patently, has not been the case for a long time. Picturesque villages in holiday areas now function seasonally, busy with second-homers and holidaymakers in the season, silent and somewhat lifeless out of it. Picturesque villages in areas of especial scenic attraction – Cotswolds, Chilterns, Dales – have tended to become the preserves of affluent second-homers, retirees and those in search of a rural idyll with the funds to meet the sky-high price of a home.
Where such villages are within reach of a motorway or trunk road or mainline railway station, the demographic profile is slightly different and the age bracket lower, because the earner is able to get to where the money is earned. But that village is unlikely to be much livelier as a result, since such people tend to keep themselves to themselves behind electronic security gates protected by advanced alarm systems and surveillance cameras. They send their children to private schools, and generally have neither the time nor the inclination to enter energetically into community life.
A great many villages have gradually subsided into a state of subdued animation. They have lost their school, their sporting clubs, their young families, their shop, often their pub. The village hall and the church are left, but neither is managing more than just to tick over. Such villages are often in lovely parts of the country and are themselves lovely. They will not be abandoned as so many medieval villages were. The old houses have had much money spent on them to make them pleasant and comfortable, and having lasted for so many centuries will probably last for several more. But the heartbeat is pretty faint. The arteries are shrunken, and not much blood is circulating.
To flourish a village has to be able to sustain itself. That means at least a primary school, a shop, a well-used village hall, a pub, preferably a recreation ground cherished by an active football club and cricket club. To enable all this, it needs to be allowed to grow. New housing for young families is an absolute imperative. I am aware that in this era of inflated property prices, the notion of ‘affordable’ homes for local families rings somewhat hollow. But any couple with young children or the potential for young children is better than none, wherever they come from and however affluent they may be.
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So let us pretend that I have been put in charge of nurturing village life. I have been named the Government’s Village Tsar, or Commissioner for Rural Communities. I have absolute power to do as I see fit, irrespective of the howls of outrage from the lobby groups and interested parties.
First of all I would make a bonfire. I enjoy bonfires. On to this one I would throw all existing statutory conservation measures and documents affecting the whole or the greater part of villages wherever they may be. All too often the effect of such protection has been to prevent any significant new building of any kind within the existing form of the village. No village is so old, so beautiful, so historic, so special that it should be denied the means to sustain itself. Historically, the whole point of the village was that it was ab
le to grow, organically and usually haphazardly and over extended periods of time to meet the needs of people. To cut off that growth is to turn it from living community into something else: heritage, museum, theme park, rest home.
East Hendred in Berkshire is one of the fifty or so Conservation Areas designated by the Vale of White Horse District Council. When I was there I met a friendly, elderly, long-term lady resident who told me that her father, as chairman of the parish council, had been instrumental in securing this protection for this lovely village. She was proud that this official chokehold had prevented any ‘nasty new houses’ being built in her village; and delighted that all the homes that the area was being forced to accept were being dumped half a mile away beside the main Wantage Road, where they would not lower the tone. That they would also be inhibited by their geographical position from making any meaningful contribution to the vitality of her village did not seem to matter to her.
There were several patches of ground within the existing form of East Hendred that could have taken a house or two, or three or four. But this is sacred ground, and no planning application would stand a chance. This is wrong, hence the need for my bonfire. Villages need to grow from within, so that those who come to live there are drawn into the community instead of being exiled on the edge of it. I used to subscribe to the general bleat against back land or back garden development. But I now believe that this can be a good way for new housing to be provided, assuming the site is suitable.
I am aware that this puts me at odds with the majority of village people, who are disposed to regard the principle of sacrificing gardens for houses with extreme disfavour and oppose them violently. Unfortunately they are often right to do so, because of the incurable urge of developers to press for the biggest and most expensive house or houses they can possibly get away with, regardless of how brutally overbearing or inappropriate they may be. But it does not have to be that way. It is not beyond the compass of a reformed planning system to ensure that such developments are modest in scale; suitable – say – for middle-income young families, or elderly couples looking for somewhere more manageable in a village context.
Our house is in the middle of Sonning Common and has a long garden. After we moved in we had several speculative approaches from companies hungrily eyeing our garden and the others along the road with a view to lucrative back land development. As it happens we would not sell our garden at any price because it gives us more pleasure than anything money could buy. The same goes for our neighbours on one side.
The situation on the other side was quite different. The building next door was at that time a solicitors’ (it has now been converted back to a private house), with a truncated rear garden. Behind that and extending behind the row of commercial properties beyond the solicitors’ was a tract of wilderness almost an acre in extent, the domain of foxes and muntjac deer and a favourite fighting ground for local cats. This has now been turned into a little enclave of ten semi-detached two- and three-bedroom homes. Planning permission was obtained on appeal in the face of fierce opposition from the parish council’s planning committee (which I was not a member of at the time) and more muted opposition from South Oxfordshire District Council. The building work, extending over the best part of two years, was a considerable nuisance and disruption, but that is part of life if you live where we live. Now the homes are there, one of them a few feet from our boundary fence, I am glad we did not object to them.
As the national supremo in charge of the health and welfare of villages, I would therefore use my powers to compel them to find room for new homes, regardless of how picture-book charming they may be. The only exceptions would be villages with no space, if there are any; I would not be so tyrannical as to demand the razing of existing buildings. Where possible, homes should be built within the existing form of the village. But I accept that, to meet the need, space has to be found around the edges of settlements as well. Again, compulsion will undoubtedly be necessary. I do not think that Sonning Common would have got round to finding room for 140-plus homes if it had not been told to.
But it would be critical to my strategy for speculative companies of the likes of Gladman to be frozen out of this process. Their speciality is to seduce the owners of farming land on the periphery of villages and towns with visions of easy wealth, and then lobby and push and agitate for that land to be designated for building. Once that happens, the map of the village is redrawn to show the land in question swelling the overall form like a goitre. The inevitable next step is to argue that the adjacent fields could and should be built on as well, to round out the profile of the settlement. There is a classic illustration of this insidious model of expansion in and around the small market town of Buntingford in Hertfordshire, which is in the process of being encircled by new housing estates because of the inability of the local council to produce a sound, watertight plan for controlling development.
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My way of addressing the challenge of finding space for the houses we need would be to empower local communities to find the answers, working with their district councils – with the threat of unleashing the Gladmans of this world should they be too inert or incompetent to do so. Every village in the country should be able to find residents who are sufficiently active, mentally alert and concerned to take charge of this process. If they can’t, so much the worse for them.
That is the problem of land supply solved. Next we have the small matter of what kind of house should be built, and how. As supremo of village renewal, I would certainly have something to say about that.
I start with my own house. Built around 1910, it is not a thing of beauty. The basic building material is red brick. The upper part of the frontage is faced with pebble-dash, and the corners of the building and the surrounds of the windows and front door are formed from a pale and rather unpleasant yellow brick. The original roof was probably slate, but was replaced before our time by dark-brown concrete tiles whose irredeemable nastiness is at least partially concealed at the back by solar panels. We have added a single-storey extension at one side and extended at the back, but nothing else has been changed significantly.
As a specimen of design there is nothing to be said about our house except that it is not offensive. It is like millions of others of its time, serviceable, decent, run-of-the-mill, unobtrusive. Its saving grace is its distinctiveness. On either side are detached red-brick houses of about the same vintage, both more handsome than ours, wholly different from each other and ours in the detail of design. Looking down the street, most of the houses dating from the first half of the twentieth century fall into this bracket: unbeautiful but individual. There is the odd bungalow, and in places the older houses have been replaced by newer ones, utterly uninteresting in terms of design, but necessarily unlike those on either side.
This is where the charm of villages like ours lies, not in quaintness or prettiness, but in modest diversity. Sonning Common grew plot by plot, each filled with someone’s idea of a decent home. Here and there are clusters or little rows of identical or very similar semi-detached houses, obviously the work of the local builder. My first home in the village was one such, half of a 1930s pebble-dashed pair whose design is replicated with variations on odd plots down the lane and around the corner.
Where the plotland model has been adhered to, this diversity has been maintained up to the present day. The houses built from the 1960s onwards are generally unexceptional at best and dispiriting at worst. But at least they stand alone, or in small concentrations, and their impact on the overall look of the village is minimal.
The key to achieving diversity is to accommodate differing concepts of what a home should be. The enemy of that interesting – if sometimes distressing – diversity is the uniformity of the modern housing estate: that deadening, dehumanising sameness that the volume housebuilders have so successfully engineered from one end of the land to the other. As the man in charge of saving the village, I would make it my business to smash the wretched
monotony of estate design; and if that means striking a blow at the hegemony of Taylor Wimpey, Bovis, Barratt, Persimmon and the rest, I am ready.
The defence invariably offered by these big beasts of construction to the charge that their houses are generic, mundane, identikit and deeply mediocre is that they are giving the market what it wants. It is an insult to the buying public and the intelligence of us all. The fact is that for those on a middle-bracket income looking for a new home, the estate and the estate house is pretty much all that is on offer. They choose it because there is no choice.
This is how the system works. Planning permission is obtained for – say, for the sake of argument – eighty houses on a seven-and-a-half-acre site on the edge of the village. The development company does nothing. It sits tight while house prices go on rising, until the costs of obtaining the land and getting planning permission are partially or wholly covered. Often it will seek to increase the value of its investment by going back to the local authority to apply to increase the number or size of the houses. Local authorities – intimidated by the cost of appeals – will often roll over rather than haggle over a permission already given in principle.
At length the company that is actually going to build and sell the homes produces from its database a design for the estate – let us call it Gresham Meadows, because that is exactly the kind of name they go for. Like all its other designs, it shows a network of sinuous ribbons of tarmac and paving along and off which are distributed a selection from its portfolio of house types, each with its rectangular patch of garden. The remainder of the space is taken up by garages and parking spaces, and the trees, shrubberies and other open and green spaces stipulated in the conditions of the permission.
Over time Gresham Meadows slowly arises from a wasteland of mud and destruction until it is ready to go on the market. The brochure will describe these houses as select, contemporary, modern, traditional, exclusive and – invariably – stunning. It will claim the estate as rural, part of a thriving community, having a genuine village feel.