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 [...]

A fight for rural England

I thought my journalism days were behind me. But sometimes life has a habit of turning things around in ways you least expect. In December 2005 I was in Rome researching what was to become the sixth Nic Costa novel, which will appear in 2008. Out of the blue I took a phone call from his wife which revealed that the large London university Imperial College had very big designs on the area where I was lucky enough to live.

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Time for save-hk.org?

The story of save-wye.org seems destined to follow me around the world. It’s a tale about a tiny rural community in Kent beating off some nasty publicly-funded developers. But my does it travel. During my chat at Post 97 I met a couple of people who knew people in Wye who’d been involved in the [...]

Something rotten in the county of Kent

I know we live in a global village but it’s still a little odd to be sitting through a media interview in Bangkok and have a curious journalist turn to you and ask, ‘So tell me about this environmental campaign in Kent.’
The story of the great battle to save Wye, told in my book Saved, [...]