Eco-homes are looming large at present. I spent yesterday evening with Colin at All Saints Middle School hearing about Ashwell’s plans to build 14 eco-homes at the edge of the proposed Chilton Woods development (a subject to which I return below). Then, coincidentally, I received a letter this morning from my old school friend Pip, telling me that one of Gordon Brown’s eco-towns is to be built at the disused army base in Long Marston, the village in Warwickshire in which we both lived as children.
My mother and I lived in a cottage not totally unlike the one in which Nick and I live in
King’s Lodge’s main claim to fame is that Charles II took refuge there after the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. The King disguised himself as a scullery boy, and when we were children the house still contained an ancient spit which the King is supposed to have turned three hundred years or so earlier.
It seems that the good people of South Warwickshire are about as enthusiastic about the eco development that has suddenly been thrust upon them as the residents of Chilton who turned out to hear Ashwell’s merry men’s latest version of their ‘vision’ for the northern fringes of Sudbury. The green space in question will not,it seems, be developed without a fight. Many residents present at the meeting clearly purchased their homes having been led to believe that what is actually a potential building site was a public open space. Once again a community feels cheated because the way that planning policies work are only transparent to anoraks, planning officials and developers.
Since the land in question belongs to the County Council one might have thought that as a public body they had a public duty to make the true situation plain at an earlier stage.
Looking at the wider picture, it is impossible not to be staggered at the pace at which the plans for Chilton Woods seem to be changing. Looking closely at the maps displayed yesterday evening it is quite clear that the built-up area of the main Chilton Woods site is to be smaller than before, and yet the number of houses to be included creeps inexorably upwards. In my view the scale of the changes make it absolutely essential that Ashwell’s revisit the local community for further consultation, since the plans that were shown to us all last year are quite different from what we saw last night. (Where has the lovely circular cricket pitch gone?) Not to make the changes clear to a wider public would, I believe, amount to deception on a grand scale.
While happy to answer questions about the virtues and the building density of the politically correct, but as yet un-designed, eco-homes, Ashwell’s representatives would not be lead on the exact densities that will obtain in the rest of the development. A cynic might think that this first low-density development of houses, which are to be green in every sense of the word, is designed to lull us (the equally green?) into a sense of false security about what will be built later on.
