And now the campaign has reached The Times:
The Times - 3 September 2011
On a green front line between urban sprawl and motorway, old foes square up for battle
Simon de Bruxelles
A tawny owl sits in a tree partly hidden by ivy, indifferent to the walkers below. A stone’s throw away, at the edge of a lake, kingfishers dive for small fish while grey herons eye the larger ones. In the distance the silhouette of an Iron Age fort rises above Liddington Hill.
It is a scene that would have delighted Richard Jefferies, the 19th-century author and naturalist, whose farmhouse is preserved as a museum next to the country park.
But things have changed since Jefferies played here as a boy. Directly in front of his former home is a busy dual carriageway and when that traffic dies down you can hear the constant roar of the M4 less than a mile away. Between the two roads is an expanse of green fields bordering the Coate Water Country Park. It is the last buffer between the fast-expanding sprawl of Swindon and the motorway. It is also the next battlefield for conservationists and developers.
Campaigners fear that changes to the planning system proposed by the Government will make it easier to get permission for developments such as the one proposed for Coate, and harder for local authorities to resist them. The Government says that a “presumption in favour of sustainable development” is the “golden thread” that runs through its future planning policy.
Felicity Cobb, a retired teacher, has single-handedly collected 18,000 signatures for a petition calling for the fields at Coate to be protected. The total is already 52,000, equivalent to one in four of the Wiltshire town’s population. But even with the support of scores of figures from the world of art and literature, including Sir Peter Blake, Sir Andrew Motion and Joanne Harris, it may not be enough to stop the fields that Jefferies wrote about disappearing beneath hundreds of new houses.
Mrs Cobb said: “We thought we had seen them off four years ago when the developers lost a planning inquiry, but they have come back again. The developers are like dogs, constantly yapping and nipping at your ankles. We are just amateurs, they are professionals.”
In the country park, there is no difficulty persuading visitors that the views across the adjacent fields need to be preserved. “There are already enough housing estates, we are surrounded by them, do we really need another one?” asked Mrs Cobb. “No one here wants it.”
She became involved in the campaign when a previous application was submitted for Coate that included a seven-storey glass pyramid and 1,900 homes. It was thrown out by a planning inspector. Now the developers are back with a new plan.
This time the Swindon Gateway Partnership, an alliance of Redrow and Persimmon Homes, has come back with a scaled-down proposal for 890 homes, shops, a school and 15 hectares of “employment space”. After a public outcry the plan was rejected by Swindon Borough Council. But the developers refused to give up, and a new planning inquiry will be held in November.
A walk down Dayhouse Lane is a stroll in the country. But across the fields there is a glimpse of the future: the grey, slab-like Great Western Hospital, the only development so far permitted in this stretch of countryside. When the hospital was first proposed, it was argued that the rural views would help patients to recover. Even those who opposed the housing estate supported it. But developers turned the argument around, pointing out that the area’s rural character had now been compromised.
Jean Saunders, the secretary of the Richard Jefferies Society who runs the Save Coate Campaign, said: “The hospital was the Trojan Horse that opened up what had been a protected area.” One Trojan Horse was swiftly followed by another. In 2004, the University of Bath proposed a £500 million move to a brand new campus at Coate.
The borough council was delighted, and withdrew the area’s status as protected landscape. Two years later, the university abandoned the idea of moving, but developers had smelt blood.
Mrs Saunders has been fighting development at Coate for more than 20 years. The campaigners’ Alamo is the Site of Special Scientific Interest at Coate Water, which they fear will be compromised. “SSSIs are our rainforests, we need to fight to protect them,” she said.
The change to “presumption in favour” will make it difficult for planners such as Swindon council to oppose development on unprotected agricultural land. The town is already encircled by some of the largest private housing estates in Britain, and Coate may be the next to be engulfed. Coate Water Park could be left as a small island of countryside in an ocean of anonymous housing.
“It would end up like a town park,” Mrs Cobb said. “It wouldn’t feel like the country any more.”
