All Entries in the "Kent" Category

A new chance for Wye

Wye college seen from the churchyard

It’s now eighteen months since an extraordinary campaign to save the rural area of Wye in Kent fought off a vile and deceitful attempt to build on an official Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I was proud to be a part of that campaign, and document it in my non-fiction retelling of the story, Saved.

If only the news had stayed as welcoming. We always knew that Imperial College, London, the principal developer behind the Wye plan, would probably abandon the village in which it inherited a promising agricultural college less than a decade before. But so soon?

One more great thing about Youtube…

I’ve been messing around with stuff on the net since this thing began in the early nineties and I was a tech journalist. Still, it never ceases to amaze me, not least because of its sheer persistence. Fifteen months ago I was in the middle of the campaign to defeat a thoroughly nasty development plan in Wye, Kent, where I live. At a very crucial moment in the campaign we knew that there was a key meeting of council officials who might, with a bit of luck, just kill the whole damned thing.

So what do you do? We had no ammunition left. No more leaked papers. No more evidence of what a scandal this was. Out of desperation pretty much I put together a quick web video, using still pictures in iPhoto documenting our beautiful part of the land, grabbed a music track off the web, and put the whole thing up as a little movie on the website and YouTube under the nae ‘What Wye might lose’.

An awful lot of people watched it. Did any of the council people who that week decided to kill the plan? I don’t know, but I hope it weighed on them a little. And then the battle was won, and the video was, for me, forgotten.

Except, it’s still on YouTube. People still find it and watch it. And comment on it too. Some idiot a while back said this…

what an ugly place, imperial should have carried out their plans then the little village would actually grow and prosper.

And other people read his comments, and made their own. Today that video’s had nearly a thousand views, not bad for something about a tiny little community in a largely forgotten part of England. Other have had their chance to say their bit too, about the chap who thinks Wye is an ugly place. Here’s my favourite comment…

i was raised and then married in wye by the then vicar and sadly departed david marriot, what the college was trying to do was awful, they have no sense of tradition ,history or any respect for the village it self and the comment that wye is ugly, man open your eyes and your soul….

If you want to see the video page go here. Or for the video itself, look below…

Will Wye need to be saved again?

It’s only just over a year since my local village of Wye was saved from grasping, greedy development by a bunch of secretive public bodies that ought to be hanging their heads in shame. I’m proud to say that I was one of the bunch of people that helped bring this stinking plan crashing to the earth. You can read all about it in Saved, my account of the campaign, which exposed, through the astonishing legwork of my journalistic colleague Justin Williams, the nasty, devious deceitful ways of those behind the project.

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.