I have donated most of the remaining copies of the book to the doughty campaigners facing a similarly greedy and unnecessary development nightmare in nearby Sellindge. So please visit their site and support their campaign, with a book if you like (all proceeds now go to their campaign and another local charity). 

For those of you too far away to get a book - or if you’d simply like to know what all the fuss is about - I’m happy to put the entire book of Saved online below. You can email it to others as a pdf and, if you join up to Scribd for free using the icon below, download your own copy too. To see a larger version which you can adjust to your own preferred size just click on the Scribd icon.

The next ten months saw an extraordinary battle by ordinary people pitched against an army of well-paid professional developers trying to turn some of the most beautiful - and protected - countryside in England over to the bulldozer. They were just ordinary citizens appalled by what was being planned, in secret and with the covert support of our own public representatives. The most extraordinary part of all is… we won. After concerted local opposition and a string of revelations on save-wye.org , the web-site I set up as a public forum to discuss Imperial’s plans, the project collapsed.

You can read this amazing saga in full on the save-wye web-site, with all the original articles there as they appeared. But this story deserves more, not least because there are many other people out there who are desperate to know how Wye won where so many others failed. The answer is through luck, determination and some very single-minded people. So in some ways this isn’t a story that far from fiction at all… though every last word is true, even though I occasionally had to pinch himself when reminded of that fact.

SAVED is a full length account of the true story of this campaign from its opening to close. It’s not hagiography or triumphalist, because this may be a short-lived victory. Nor does it seek to hide the mistakes that were made along the way, because one important thing we learned during this fight was that honest and openness were often the most powerful weapons the Wye campaigners had - and sometimes the only ones.

I’m grateful to everyone who helped with the Wye campaign, in particular my colleague in the site, Justin Williams, without whom this story would not have had such a satisfactory ending.

Jonathon Porritt, the well-known environmentalist who is now Founder Director of Forum for the Future, writes, ‘This is a fascinating book, full of insights into the workings of local politics, new, web-based ways of campaigning, different environmental tactics, and institutions as powerful as they are unaccountable.

‘As a result of a wonderfully effective campaign, this little corner of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Kent is safe for now. But as the author himself points out, the agents of the kind of wholly unsustainable development that is still eroding our countryside will never give up and never go away. With local democracy in such a state of disrepair, in so many parts of the land, many more battles of this kind will still need to be fought.’

Shaun Spiers, chief executive, Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, said, ‘Imperial College’s science park plan for Wye was in essence a smash and grab operation, designed to let the university cash in on its greenfield AONB landholding around a beautiful Kent village.

That it failed was largely thanks to the website save-wye, the brief but gripping history of which is chronicled in this book. We in CPRE were delighted to offer the local campaigners help and support.

There is much in Saved to worry countryside campaigners, but also much to cheer them. The role of the local council is depressing, as is the failure of most local media to question the developer’s official line.

Yet the book also shows that schemes such as Wye Park can be defeated, however impressive their official backing, and that journalism and the democratic process in their truest forms can triumph when the established media and body politic have gone bad.’

Professor Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Daily Mirror, and now Professor of Journalism at City University, London, and one of the country’s leading media commentators, has kindly contributed the foreword to the book.

In it he writes, ‘…this is not a story about Nimbyism. It is about right versus wrong; about transparency versus secrecy; about truth versus lies; about democracy versus authoritarianism.’

You can read this as a pdf file available below (60K). Just a reminder that, if you find yourself in the village, copies of Saved will usually be available in both Wye News and the New Flying Horse, and at the Timber Batts in Bodsham, as well as through the usual book trade channels. It’s a lovely village to visit…still.

You can read Roy Greenslade’s introduction to the book in full by clicking the link below.

What was at risk was more than eight hundred acres of beautiful and supposedly highly protected farmland (some of which you can see here) classified as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Kent. The land was grabbed by Imperial College when it took over and progressively destroyed one of the world’s most famous agricultural colleges which had been based in the village for a century. Imperial lost its battle to redevelop Wye, but it remains the owner of the estate it got so cheaply.

And there’s the rub. Over the past year, while protesting that it intends to support the local community, it has steadily run down everything it can. The farm was put up for lease - and a well researched bid to turn it into a community venture was flatly rejected almost the moment the detailed application went in.

So who gets to run this beautiful piece of southern England? Believe it or not farmers who appear to be more happy as property developers. I am out of campaigning now, but an excellent Kent website www.wattyler.com has documented the latest developments in this sorry saga. They are worrying indeed, not least because they reveal what many of us have known for a long time: that the vindictive individuals who got their fingers burned last year can’t wait to ‘get their revenge’ on the doughty community that sent them packing.

I hope the battle of Wye will not need to be fought again. There is no social or economic need to use this precious landscape for anything other than its natural purpose - agriculture. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply looking to line their pockets.