Subscribe to RSS @
Some thirty odd years ago when, newly married we moved to this area, we used to drive through where we now live and think it a nice, fairly quiet village. When we moved here fourteen years ago it was still pretty quiet and, whilst not small, it still qualified as a ‘village’ with it’s three pubs, three small shops and sub-post office. A recently completed by-pass had removed most of the traffic and the busiest it ever got was when the kids started and finished school as we have both a primary and a local ‘country’ area secondary. And between us and the outer northern reaches of the city was a buffering swathe of farmland that, we were told, was sacrosanct from ever being anything else. Yes. Sure.
And then… where our local road meets the bypass, someone thought it an ideal spot for a petrol station. And hey, now we’ve got a petrol station let’s build a McDonalds next to it – after all, there are only eight local McDonalds and that just ain’t enough! And this piece of land next to McDonalds would make a swell place for a Travel Lodge type motel. And then one pub closed. And then, last year, another closed and has put up a planning application to turn the grounds into an apartment block and some housing.
And then… as I have written here before, the local council decided that swathe of farmland between us and the city outskirts – the buffer zone we were always told would never be built on – well hey – we could get hundreds and hundreds of houses on that. We could connect up the village with the city in one huge orgy of cheap house building!
And then… it turns out that the big field between the village and the bypass isn’t owned by a farmer after all. It’s owned by the bloody church who think it would be a grand idea to, er, sell it off to a developer for building houses on. Hundreds and hundreds of houses.
I live at the other end of the village where all this is going to happen. In fact, I live in the very last house before the farmland starts and I have a view that whilst flat and not inspiring, at least does not contain dense, cheap and shoddy English housing. It is open to the horizon and the fields next to us are ancient flood plains that do a great job.
And then… what did we learn last night? Some bugger has submitted plans to build a practice golfing range and putting green with a golf shop and large car park just the other side of our windows. and if that’s not bad enough – they want to keep it floodlit until ten at night! The value of my property and quality of my life, which has been taking a dive since the housing estates were announced, just took a deeper tumble into the abyss. And if this plan of building on a flood plain and erecting huge lighting beside a residential area gets the green light then I will be forced to assume that quite a few members of our local council are taking big, fat backhanders.
Oh my! Not good. Not good at all. The housing developments were bad enough but a floodlit golf course outside your window?
No Andy my friend, you have to fight that one. Selfishly speaking, your little haven is my escape to sanity from the madness that is Heathrow Central. When you plan the good old fashioned ’sit in’ that the youth seem to have no spirit for, give me a call. I’ll practice my protest songs and bring the pastries.
mmmmmm. London Cheesecake…..
nimby ism is such a shame, think of the savings in having the whole dwelling lit at someone else’s expense (garden too). there are other benefits; the company of lots of friendly people, appeal for the dogs, burglary less likely, value of house goes up for golfers – perhaps you could both take the game up? do they play piped music?
think glass half full and you’ll come up with more benefits
To be honest Brian the idea of a practice range and green up the road here do not worry me too much as such. I have three objections which are not nimby’ish at all. The first is that the entrance should not be from the village but from the by-pass. The flood-lighting and night-time use I DO object to. And the main one is that this flood plain has worked well for centuries. Develop on a flood plain and you destroy the environmental balance that our ancestors knew a damn more about than modern planners – and which has cuased much of the flooding we have been seeing in recent years.
You should get involved, build a hide at the bottom of your garden, then after a hard day, take a few beers or nice bottle of wine down to your hide and when the floodlights come take out your air rifle and see how many you can shoot – what you shoot however – the golfers or the floodlights is really up to how much of the alcohol has been consumed- after all, the jails are full so they can’t lock you up, maybe they’ll give you a an ASBO !!!
Don’t for one minute think it hadn’t ocurred to me! I wondered if it would be legal to try and shoot the golf balls out of the air….
hopefully it won’t go ahead (I assume you are down the council meetings kicking arse?), otherwise you’ll get alot of broken windows.
[...] last December in a piece entitled ‘Look What They’ve Done To My Song’ I had a little rant about the changing face of village life that ended with the news that a [...]