How to ruin a county

[cromwell]

Last Saturday we came back from a few days holiday in Northumberland. It is a lovely place, but not as lovely as it used to be because of the greed of developers.

There is a seaside village up there called Beadnell. According to a local person I met Beadnell is 90% plus holiday lets; in winter it is a ghost village.
The situation is being made worse by the Duke of Northumberland, who seems to be the type of man who could turn anyone into a socialist. He owns lots of land in the country and seems intent on building on most of it. Forty plus new holiday homes are being thrown up in Beadnell and Jesus, are they ugly. More are planned for the village green.

There is a village called Embleton; the middle of it is like going back in time. Peaceful, sleepy, lovely. On the way into the village they are slinging up a new estate of houses you could find anywhere. They really jar; no attention has been paid to how they fit in with the existing properties and I'm guessing most will be outside the price range locals could pay.

Northumberland has a lot going for it; the natural beauty of the countryside and miles of golden beaches that are relatively uncrowded. What could happen though is that developers cashing in on "lovely, undeveloped" Northumberland will overdevelop it and ruin it for just pure greed; and that would be a real shame.

[Suff]

He owns lots of land in the country and seems intent on building on most of it.

Well if you read one article on the DM, about him, I'm sure they would agree with you.

But then if you read another article by the DM, you get a very different view. Where the Duke is the head of a "family business" which does the development. Reading the article you are told, in less than one word, that the estate has set aside more than £12m just for the upkeep of the historic properties on the estate and that a single incident wiped out the fund and forced sales of very precious parts of the estate to recover those funds.

Then if you dig even further, you find that the Duke gave away a painting worth £2.8m to settle part of an inheritance tax bill.

In short, the least profitable parts of the estate are the farms and the most profitable are building on the land.

To me it's down to the council and the building control to manage this, not the Duke.

If Inheritance tax were to cease, forthwith, then this kind of estate transition would cease immediately. However the "Democrats" are always rabid about destroying the estates with inheritance taxes then wail about the consequences of their decisions.

Sometimes I find the Irony a little too hard to take. Especially someone who has lived and built within the Scottish building laws. On my last estate in Scotland (built on the side of a golf course as a prime estate), one of the houses had permission to extend the garages and build over them to give the house much more room. Permission was granted and the building was done. After I left, when the owner of that house went bankrupt and tried to sell, the planning came in, found it was not as planned and forced the removal of both Garages and the loft room over the Garages and the whole thing to be re-built.

That is how strong planning can be. If planning won't use the laws, we can't blame the people who take advantage of it.

[Gal]

Cromwell Embleton isn't far from our caravan site! It is indeed a beautiful part of the world, and like you, we were horrified when we saw new ugly houses being built on the outskirts of our fav place ever, Alnmouth. They really do nothing for the village at all - I'm very much against building new in somewhere that has such a lot of natural beauty, it just snatches all that back and alters the very heart of it all.

If the new houses were prettier, or more in keeping with the locale, then fair enough, but many do not seem to be. The locals are upset about it also.

[Workingman]

It is not just Northumberland.

The A1, the Great North Road of olden times, meanders nearby many old villages dating from the 13th and 14th centuries, with many of them now blighted with huge estates of ticky tacky boxes. There has not even been a nod to them being designed in keeping with their surrounds. Where it passes close to large urban sprawls, the towns and cities, they have simply become dormitories for commuters, many of whom have no sympathy for the countryside or the rural way of life.

Sad.

[TheOstrich]

I thought that new developments in rural villages had to be broadly sympathetic to the locality? Must be wrong in that .....

[Workingman]

New, new ones, maybe, but not those of the 70s. 80s and even the 90s. Some of them are horrendous.

[cromwell]

You have a point about inheritance tax Suff.

Gal, I was in Alnmouth last Friday! It is indeed a lovely spot, with the golf course right next to the sea and a fine beach. I understand the need for housing (even if a lot of the new housing in Northumberland will go as holiday lets), but does it have to be so spectacularly ugly and out of place? I'm not surprised the locals are upset.

WM, the holiday homes in Beadnell are supposed to be "New England" style houses. I think that would come as a surprise to New Englanders! A tall chimney is about the only thing that is out of brick (dear things, bricks), the rest of it looks like clapboard but probably isn't. Cheap, nasty and out of place. Northumberland isn't New England anyway!