Update on the 'Save our Back Gardens' campaign
The 'Save our Back Gardens' campaign is gaining momentum - and some results!
- The online petition is still running and everyone in South of the Borough will also get a paper version of the petition through their door in the next week or two.
- This week we heard that the planning application to demolish two semis and build eight houses in Somerset Ave had been turned down, following objections from a large number of people living nearby.
- I was also very pleased to learn that the Council is undertaking character area studies across the Borough - these will describe the character of each area in terms of building design and landscape, and identify what types of new building would be appropriate for each. These will act as supplementary planning guidance so we will be able to quote them when considering planning applications.
This campaign is all about protecting our back gardens from inappropriate developments. It's not blanket opposition to all new housing, especially when it can be built on existing derelict or infill sites.
In fact, in South of the Borough we have provided many hundreds of new homes in the last twenty years or so, such as those in Mansfield Park (on the site of RAF Chessington), Winey Park (on the site of the MoD buildings, Chessington) and the Chantry Park area running down to the Bonesgate stream. But the fact is that all these developments have been of homes with gardens. And it is the gardens that give the suburbs their distinctive attractiveness.
Hardly anyone in this part of the Borough has a large garden - this isn't Coombe Hill! In fact, most of us live in modest two or three bedroom semis or terraced houses with smallish gardens. But whether we individually have a long thin garden or a short plot, we all collectively benefit from the ribbons of green that lie between our houses.
If we start replacing two houses with eight houses or a block of flats, and repeat that up and down the roads, then the very features that make this a pleasant place to live will be lost.
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However I am still uneasy about ruling out redevelopments which encroach on some garden space. The latest example I have seen was in Rustington in West Sussex. A series of bungalows purchased by developers and redeveloped into a higher density development losing some but not all of the garden space. Bungalows as you probably know are not a great use of land space and these redevelopments achieve Government policy which is to increase housing density in urban areas in order to build the additional houses which are desperately required. It is the only market based solution which works - which in the unfortunate absence of any mainstream political party backing a huge Council house building programme is all we are left with in order to try and deal with the housing crisis.
I really don't have a problem with large houses with huge gardens being sympathetically developed to higher densities. The issue in the Chessington area is that we have smallish houses with smallish gardens, often without off-street parking - most garden development proposals would seriously damage the environment and put far too high pressure on the narrow roads.
As I said most of the new homes with gardens in the Borough built in the last 20 years or so are down here, and we didn't object to the large developments on genuine brownfield sites.
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