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SO, AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS, beloved by the villagers as a beauty spot, celebrated in romantic verse and Victorian postcards, the streamside meadow and the causey stone path are to go.To me its beauty and wildlife value seem self-evident. I just assume that other people see what I see, feel what I feel. I'm wrong. The Department of the Environment can judge this better than we can. Well, we're not experts, are we? 'The effect on the natural environment would be relatively small,' says the DoE report, dismissing my fears.
I get the impression that beauty is inadmissable as evidence, it is too subjective, yet planners can grasp complex paradoxes that I find hard to understand. Have you ever come across Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?;
Not objecting on PrincipleThat's how I see the Principle of Outline Planning Permission. I think of my brother's role as Giant Blunderbore in the pantomime last week, in his Cloudland Castle; a building which is there but not there. Floating in the clouds, but accessible by beanstalk.
Does that mean it is real? Or is it imaginary? Should we be worried about its impact on the landscape? The surprising answer is that, at this stage, you should be neither worried nor unworried; whatever you might think about this block of flats is completely irrelevant because, and here comes the clever bit, it may - or may not - be there. You must NOT, you CANNOT object to it. Still mystified? Then let me give you an example; I once heard a man in a black suit explain to a group of incredulous councillors that they must on no account object to a plan to build 42 houses on a meadow in a village because they had already given outline approval for 8 houses. Forty-two is a legitimate variation on eight. Now can you see the advantages of the Principle of Outline Planning?
The Beauty of ScenesBut coming back to the block of flats, even if it is real, 'with careful design' it would not 'appear unduly dominant or intrusive'. The reason for that is the 'background of a high, well wooded embankment'. Although couldn't that be a twelve-storey block of flats? Wouldn't that be a legitimate variation on three?Well, who wants to look at a well wooded embankment anyway? Just me apparently. 'There would be a loss of openness,' the DoE report concedes, but adds that 'the overall effect on the character of the immediate surroundings would be limited.'
I'm a keen walker and I've spent years training in the visual arts and observing the landscape, but I still can't grasp these paradoxes. They put me in mind of fairy stories, or passages from Alice Through the Looking Glass.
'And it thinks that they add to the beauty of scenes,
The Hunting of the Snark Sorry to go on, but I needed to get that out off my chest.
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Yes there is a '3-storey block of flats' on the plan, but that is 'an indicative proposal only'.
The causey stone path shown on this 1920s postcard, and above, as it is today, will disappear under a two-lane road bridge and an access ramp, but, never mind, this will 'not significantly detract from the enjoyment of walkers using the path past the site.'