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LOCAL VIEWS
Last updated 16-Apr-2008 06:30

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LOCAL VIEWS: ON THE PLANNING DEBATE:
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A Place to Call Home - by Sarah Elderkin
THE prospect of additional housing in Shrewton, and no doubt other nearby villages, is a vexed question. But it needn’t be – if we accept that such housing is inevitable, just as it has always been, and if, instead of opposing the concept wholesale, we put our energies into ensuring that whatever is built comes on terms we have a say in.

At the recent open parish council meeting on this topic, I was astonished to find myself almost exclusively in the company of people very much like me – middle-aged-galloping-to-elderly, middle-class, homeowners. Unlike myself, however, most of them seemed in favour of keeping things that way, and of protecting what to me seems a sadly insular and short-sighted exclusivity.

Do we want Shrewton to become a quaint community of middle-class geriatrics? That would surely be a dead community, one with no future. As it is, we are told the local school is being downsized to fewer classrooms. The reason is clear: the houses that do get built in Shrewton are far too expensive for local young families to afford, and the few incomers who can afford them are also able to afford, and largely choose, to send their children to private schools.

If this state of affairs continues, Shrewton within a couple of generations will have no school. The village will have no younger generation, and the school itself will go the way of other institutions that existed in my childhood and have disappeared in my lifetime:

• two full-time bakeries (Clack & Harris’s ‘top shop’ and Chant’s ‘bottom shop’), both with daily delivery services and both also general stores;

• three other general stores in addition to Clifford’s (Ross’s, Pearce’s and Bond’s), providing food, hardware, fuel oil, clothing and haberdashery;

• a wet-fish shop (Mrs Broad’s);

• a separate post office (run by Mr & Mrs Welsh in my youth);

• a hairdresser’s (Mrs Shepherd’s);

• two sweetshops (Mould’s, also selling stationery, fancy goods and newspapers, and Belbin’s);

• two petrol stations in addition to Bridge Garage (Grisley’s and Druce’s);

• a butchery with delivery service (we now have a butchery again);

• a bank (on the corner next to the Catherine Wheel);

• a youth club.

Other institutions that came and went included a café (Mrs Budden’s) and a fish and chip shop (Ruth Bundy’s), not to mention, of course, the total of one part-time and two full-time churches – but that’s another issue.

Londis (the old Clifford’s) and Bridge Garage do an admirable and valued job of providing many of these services today – but probably when we think about housing, we are thinking as much about the ‘character’ of the village as about convenience and availability, and there is no doubt that the loss of some of these institutions and the people who ran and used them also led to the loss of a certain ‘character’. We loved and lost them. They were there and they are no longer.

The point is that there is no such thing as a defining moment in any community’s character or history. Change is permanent and unstoppable.

I happen to have been born into a family that has lived in Shrewton for generations. My great-grandparents and their children lived in cottages that stood roughly where Mrs Daphne Affleck lives today. The view from their ‘idyllic’ rose-wreathed front doors was up the hillside and across peaceful summer fields of buttercups and daisies, or over the deeply drifted snow of the old, harsh winters.

I wonder what they felt when the government in the early 1950s decided to build – not 50 yards from their front doors and completely overshadowing their homes – the council houses that were to form the Furlong Way estate? I can’t imagine they were happy about it, notwithstanding the fact that a number of their descendants would be beneficiaries of this post-war building boom, my own family included.

And then I remember Meadway being built. And Highfield Rise. When these small private estates were planned, local people, in just the same way, objected to them and to all the “strangers” moving into the village. Now these “strangers” have been woven into the village’s eternal fabric and have perhaps in turn also become objectors.

And so it goes on, and so it always will. Communities, like language, are always dynamic, never static. People as individuals might – and do – resist change, but change comes anyway. The challenge, then, for those who care about the wider dimensions of history, is perhaps to think unselfishly about the way change can be influenced.

The future, by definition, depends on the youth. What we need more than anything in this village is affordable housing for young people, many of whom have reasons of history and heritage to want to be here, and to raise families here, and to keep this village thriving. In today’s alienated and fractured society, that kind of continuity is surely desirable and to be encouraged.

What we don’t need are hundreds of houses in one or two locations on the village outskirts, destined to become sink estates.

At the parish meeting I attended, we were told, to gasps of horror, that planners had identified at least 15 sites around the village where housing development would be possible. These had been identified in accordance with the government diktat that South Wiltshire must accommodate 12,000 new houses within the next 18 years. We don’t know yet how many of these houses must come to Shrewton but mathematics and realities offer a rough idea, and the planners have produced a document that suggests several dozen “preferred options”.

This document is presented in the honeyed language of hearts and flowers, promoting the government’s self-styled caring approach to “sustainability” and the “infrastructure” and the “will of the community” and so on.

No one should be fooled by this. It is the business of governments to get their programmes through, and they do this by all means possible within the law. Lulling people into a false sense of security is frequently part of the process.

We shouldn’t be gratuitously suspicious but we need to ask some serious questions and insist on complete answers. We should be asking, for example, what “sustainability” means in this context. Are there objective, measurable criteria for determining this “sustainability”? If so, what are these criteria? How were they defined?

When it comes to infrastructure – roads (and, importantly, parking), power and sewerage – what will the government’s role and responsibility be? What burden will fall on local authorities, and at what expense to whom? What are the plans for solving existing village problems concerning, for example, sewage disposal?

If we met the planners halfway, as willing co-operators, perhaps these and other serious questions to which we need far-reaching answers might be more readily tackled.

In similar vein, I suggest that it would be better for us to consider accepting and supporting (matters of sustainability and infrastructure having been satisfactorily addressed) small, socially appropriate and life-friendly building projects in conceivably ALL the 15 or so locations mentioned, rather than fighting a losing battle against the tide of inevitability and eventually having to put up with something of elephantine proportions that we definitely don’t want imposed on us.

Change will come. Government objectives must be achieved, quotas must be met. We need to decide to be a pro-active part of this – rather than being like the doomed dinosaurs of our day.

I, for one, would prefer to live in a vibrant, balanced, self-perpetuating community, where the sound of children’s voices will not soon become a curiosity.

• Sarah Elderkin (née Cruse) is a former deputy editor of the Salisbury Journal

Sir,

Sarah Elderkin’s “A Place to Call Home” postulates that, because planning change is inevitable, we should seek to channel and shape it to our own liking. In other words we should embrace “good change” and fight “bad change”. On the face of it, this is a perfectly reasonable strategy. However, when the storm of the 15 possible sites has passed and only the truly viable sites remain, the real debate begins about what constitutes “good” and “bad” change for a village like Shrewton – and who defines them.

In my view, the idea of using new developments to return Shrewton to some golden age, when the village population was a balanced cross-section of ages and types is an illusory one.

Why did all those shops and facilities die in the village? In most cases it was because they could not compete with the larger shops and facilities in nearby towns. Whilst they had a captive audience they were viable. However, once car ownership became the norm, people started shopping and spending leisure time in Amesbury, Salisbury or Devizes and these village facilities gradually withered away. This had everything to do with mobility, and very little to do with housing or village demographics.

Many villages – and Shrewton is not at all exceptional in this – now attract a disproportionate number of older residents. Again, I think that this has much less to do with housing availability than that; actually, younger people simply don’t WANT to live in villages. Given the choice, they prefer the “life” and bustle of towns and cities. Okay, that is a gross generalisation, but I think it holds true for the majority of young people. If it were not true, why would enterprising landlords not have bought up these larger village houses that young people cannot afford, and converted them into flats for rent? Flat conversions in towns and cities across the land are chock full of young people, so why not in villages? Simple answer, young people really don’t want to live in villages in any significant number.

For young families I think it is a similar story, though for different reasons. Young families are typically financially very stretched. Living in a village, where there is no local employment, usually entails the need for at least one, or maybe two cars (if both parents are working). Having to haul the kids several times a week to the nearest town to cater for their hobbies or interests is also not ideal. So, although the idea of bringing up the kids in an idyllic village setting is an attractive proposition, it’s also an expensive one when compared to living in a town or city with everything on the doorstep and jobs just up the road. The only way to fix this is to make villages into small towns, something few village residents want.

I think that, for the reasons I describe above, if we rolled with the punches and allowed lots of smaller homes or flats to be built around Shrewton, within a short time these very same homes would be full of older or retired single people and not young people or young families.

Sarah very eloquently points out that change is something that happens whether we want it or not. I would suggest that villages like Shrewton having become what the Americans call an “age ghetto” is just as much the product of changes in society as the other changes which she chronicles in her piece. Trying to reverse such changes on a local level is a doomed enterprise.

So, “bad change” should be resisted and “good change” embraced. But who decides what is good and what is bad? Leaving it to the planning authority is probably unwise. Let’s not forget that this is the same planning authority who allowed the Churchfields industrial estate in Salisbury to be built without any proper access road. The same authority that has consistently failed to implement any effective solution to the Airman’s Cross death-trap. This is the same planning authority that allowed the development of the Bourne Way retail park straddling the single-lane A36 trunk road in Salisbury, with resulting traffic chaos – and so on. The past record does not inspire great confidence.

Let’s not be meek in responding to the possibility of inappropriate developments in our village. Let’s make it very clear how we feel, whilst at the same time raising genuine unemotional pragmatic objections to the sites we don’t want. Let’s ensure that the clearly unsuitable sites will be discounted early on in the process. We can then try to come to some consensus within the community about what we feel would be useful and appropriate additions to the village on the remaining sites, and fight for what we want and need.

Passivity is not an option. I suggest that we adopt as our motto a modified version of Edmund Burke’s famous phrase.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of rampant development is for good men to do nothing."

If you doubt the truth of this, take a drive around the new “super-sized” Amesbury.

From Alan Trevennor - Shrewton Webmaster.

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