COMMENT: William Cash on a tale of two plans dividing Bridgnorth
William Cash speaks ahead of a key meeting on housing plans.
Bridgnorth Town Council will tomorrow hold an online ‘extraordinary meeting’ for councillors to consider which of two sites it prefers for a huge housing development for the historic market town on the River Severn.
Both rival proposals, one proposing 1,050 units off the A458 at Tasley west towards Shrewsbury and the other, proposing 850 units, close to the Stanmore Business Park towards Wolverhampton, claim to be ‘garden village’ schemes. Both are seeking to become the ‘designated’ choice to deliver on Shropshire Council’s Local Plan.
The result has been bitter feuding and village rebellions not seen in the Bridgnorth area since George Osborne’s NPPF planning wars of nearly a decade ago. Back then, I was part of a local resistance group, Save Bridgnorth Hills, with more than 500 supporters in the Bridgnorth and Morville area, who successfully campaigned to stop the beautiful landscape of the Shropshire Hills become industrialised and ruined by a plague of wind turbines.
The battle took several years after we held our very first public meeting at the Down Inn, near Bridgnorth.
More than 100 people of all ages, representing the real community, from farmers to teachers, were crammed into our first packed meeting in the ‘wedding suite’ of the pub.
We soon had to move to Morville village hall for meetings as the numbers grew. It was proper local democracy.
With the pandemic ruling out public meetings, and democratic – rather than merely digital consultation – there is an alarming sense that the sudden, 11th-hour, introduction by mass housing builder Taylor Wimpey of their 1000 plus scheme, with further building west up to 2038, has taken advantage of the lockdown to silence opposition.
Until a few weeks ago, the Stanmore/Hermitage site looked like the clear favourite as the garden village scheme had already been approvedin broad outline. Then Taylor Wimpey came forward with its controversial scheme that would certainly change the face and identity of Bridgnorth as we know it, most worryingly for Bridgnorth tourism.
