Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Chatting => Chatting on the Plot => Topic started by: Growster... on January 17, 2018, 18:55
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Our allotments are potentially under threat of future housing development.
Although the landowner (not the Parish Council, who rent the plots from him), has said that he isn't interested in selling, we know for a fact that he has adjoining sites which can easily be accessed, and we've seen his surveyors around and about. They're all in the 'Neighbourhood Plan'.
I'm in my seventy-first year, and don't think that taking on a new Patch is that fantastic an option. It'll take several years for the plots to go after planning, and by then, I will probably have had enough, even though I still have a great Mantis tiller, a super Webb mower and all the encouragement from a gorgeous wife and lovely friends.
But making my Patch over for a housing estate isn't my way of liking the way Tunbridge Wells Council treat the people who pay them.
No politics here, just an observation. We're fighting them.
Oh yes; they ain't seen nothing yet...
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Good for you! You'll be ready for them as soon as they try :)
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We're likely to lose our small site in the next 8-10 years too sadly. The local school has been forced into expanding into double entry and will need to expand into nearby woodland. It's also a very affluent area of the city, all too tempting for the local council to flog off for a few more high council tax band housing.
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Good for you! You'll be ready for them as soon as they try :)
Sure will, Mum - thanks for this!
We have a 'referendum' on our Neighbourhood Plan coming up, so watch this space! The golf course and the old Springfield Nursery is currently the rage as well...
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We're likely to lose our small site in the next 8-10 years too sadly. The local school has been forced into expanding into double entry and will need to expand into nearby woodland. It's also a very affluent area of the city, all too tempting for the local council to flog off for a few more high council tax band housing.
Worcester is a great place, Plot 1, and allotments just don't seem to fit in with the 'powers that be' these days. I'm sorry you're in the same situation.
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We're likely to lose our small site in the next 8-10 years too sadly. The local school has been forced into expanding into double entry and will need to expand into nearby woodland. It's also a very affluent area of the city, all too tempting for the local council to flog off for a few more high council tax band housing.
Worcester is a great place, Plot 1, and allotments just don't seem to fit in with the 'powers that be' these days. I'm sorry you're in the same situation.
I'm pragmatic about it in all honesty. If we lose the site, we'll just make sure we're provided with a suitable replacement in the area. Broadly our council is quite supportive of allotments, it's just that our site is sat on some extremely valuable land.
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Ah, the old David and Goliath situation again! We took on the Environment Agency to prevent them breaching our sea defences and letting us be subject to tidal flooding. Boy, they didn't know what hit them either and we won 30 years of safety subject to no major natural breach. You go for it Growster and I'll back you all the way!
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It's amazing isn't it? We keep hearing about the enormous amount of money the elderly are costing the NHS, but allotments, which are a cheap way of exercising, eating healthily and having good, stimulating company seem to be deemed of no importance.
I'm sure that a lot of us also donate surplus veg to friends and neighbours, thereby helping them to eat a healthy diet and cut down on food miles.
The plots encourage wild life (some of which we could do without!), and I know I always feel much more lighthearted when I'm on mine in the early summer mornings, listening to the birds singing.
It's not just the older plotholders who benefit either, I'm sure a lot of the younger ones are happier and healthier for growing their own veg. It's a hobby that must save the government millions overall, and can be provided by local councils at very little cost to themselves, but they seem to regard them as unimportant.
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Neighbourhood plans earmark where housing, what type and how much can go somewhere. Our parish was going to do one some years back, but haven't. We have planning for 9 bungalows, but no one wanted to buy the land and the local land owner showed plans of houses and bungalows,which the parish council says is too many for the neighbourhood plan!!
The whole of a parish has to be consulted,including people unable to attend.
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I've started to try and understand what the issue really is, and am afraid that there is so much obfuscation, legal-speak and gobbledegook in the hundreds of pages of documents, there will be many question marks as to what my village is really getting.
I think I'm reasonably intelligent - well, bright enough to understand a business with which I was associated for all my working life, but these documents are just totally confusing!
I like your comments All - thank you!
I think this bout of 'horticultural melancholia' is all part of the January scene, so perhaps I'll pretend to be in my 51st year and keep at it!
Seed catalogues anyone...? We bought the spuds yesterday!
;0)
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I'm under the impression that councils have a statutory duty to provide allotments where there is demand, and that allotments cannot be taken away without permission from the deputy prime minister's office (though I don't think we actually have a deputy prime minister at the moment - my impressions go back to issues that came up when John Prescott was the chap we would have had to appeal to).
But even if that's the case I recognise that it would be a huge wrench to have to relocate from a well-husbanded plot and start again on virgin territory carved out of a field inconveniently far away. I'm also 71, and a bit creaky, and loss of our present site would be a massive blow.
We're in Oxford, where the council claims to be allotment-friendly, and our local Federation of Allotment Associations has constructive quarterly liason meetings with the Parks Department. In the movements toward planned building on pockets of land all the allotment sites are currently exempted - though my wife rents a field for horse grazing on land which is grassed-over landfill, in the green belt and part of a wild-life corridor, and that is listed for possible building.
Every time I go to our site, which has 2 vehicle entrances and 3 grass roads between the plots, I imagine the site as a plan for a very desirable inner-city housing estate. Even if each house was given a whole 10-pole plot it would yield about 200 houses, so the money potentially involved must mean that there are developers fantasising and salivating. Given that so much of what goes on in our city seems developer-driven one has to worry a little....
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Growster - why not contact your local MP and also anyone else in office who could be useful in conservation issues including the Green Party. It would also be useful if you can find someone to translate the docs into plain English so you can get a better idea what it's all about. We were incredibly fortunate to have someone on board whose job included the management of land and sea and, without this person and our brilliant but ex-MP, I don't know where we'd be. How does the landowner feel about it all?
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Might be worth getting in touch with NSALG, or joining if you are not a member they help many sites that are threatened with closure
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If you fight you can win. You have to be organised. There will be a thread on here about when we were fighting for our site.
We got a copy of Sophie Andrews Allotment Handbook which was brilliant. It’s only a few quid
Get NSALG help ! We couldn’t have beaten off the council without their brilliantly combative legal eagle. The Allotment Act trumps most things 🙂
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Funny but the local large and titled landowner cleared his private allotment holders off land behind the town's main street and had plans to upgrade the shopping facilities and build houses on the cleared allotment site. There was major opposition to the shops but what killed the plan off was that the supermarket that was the lynch pin of the whole plan didn't know it was involved (just don't ask) and the whole scheme fell over due to lack of investors in the scheme.
There's now a large area of derelict land where the planning permission for houses may have lapsed backing on to the main street (which street amounts to very little as there are plenty of good shopping facilities by bus or car within half an hour of travel and an awful lot of stuff delivered if you watch the vans coming in from elsewhere).
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Growster - why not contact your local MP and also anyone else in office who could be useful in conservation issues including the Green Party. It would also be useful if you can find someone to translate the docs into plain English so you can get a better idea what it's all about. We were incredibly fortunate to have someone on board whose job included the management of land and sea and, without this person and our brilliant but ex-MP, I don't know where we'd be. How does the landowner feel about it all?
Goosery Duck (!), we know our MP - Greg Clark - very well, as he's been pretty good at working away at the lazy burglars at Kent CC about other issues for us (speeding traffic etc). He's on our side, and we're looking at the bigger picture for our village, not just allotments. We've already seen off a useless councillor.
The bloke who owns our plots owns half of Surrey already. Hes not really going to be the sort of chap to deal with, but we're pressurising the PCC, and they're on our side. They just need to get the vote out at the right time and for the right reasons.
Meetings and rather heavy noise are being planned - and some have already taken place - as we speak.
Have to say that the greater good of the village comes before cabbages and kings on The Patch...