LESSONS FROM FAILURE
PLANNING PERMISSION
REFUSED ON EX-ARMY CAMP

Association for the Development of Craft Villages

As readers of the first edition of this Handbook will know, we had high hopes of obtaining a large ex-army camp in Shropshire, for the transformation into a craft village, mainly based on houses and workshops within the old wooden barracks.

This was given the blessing of council meetings at district and county levels when the idea was first mooted, but was eventually turned down at a county planning committee meeting by 13 votes to 11.

We have learnt several lessons from this failure: (1) that it's no use sending out a huge well-produced glossy report to councillors, they won't bother to read even the summary. One's time is much better spent going to visit them in their homes. We left this to` the last minute, and of the dozen we had time to visit, almost a11 voted for us. Only by a personal visit can one discover their fears and misconceptions. (2) that the DoE guidelines about treatment of; council derelict land need changing - the DoE were prepared to give the council aim to demolish the whole camp as derelict and to turn it into extremely low grade agricultural land, but if our scheme involved only partial demolition of the site and saving the saveable buildings, then not only would no grant aid be forthcoming, but the price of the land which the council was buying off the army via the DoE changed from about £15 an acre (derelict land price) to £8,000 an acre (light industrial land price). (3) that there needs to be a 'craft' planning use category separate from 'light industrial' - one of the council's many fears was that if they gave us permission for a craft village and we failed, our financial backers could turn the site into an industrial estate. (4) that if the officers of the council are against you on such a large-scale scheme, you've really had it, as there are innumerable insuperable obstacles they can pull out of the bag. Unfortunately, the officers with whom we were dealing had already spent a year preparing a detailed demolition scheme, and were not happy about jumping from this risk free future into the unknown with us.

The chief planning officer told his councillors that ours was an 'excellent project that deserved to be carried out somewhere' and we have since contacted all county councils in Britain, and have looked at half a dozen sites, including several in urban areas. The urban possibilities seem to hold most promise at the moment, and we hope to be preparing a detailed feasibility study for a London site this year.

But on the whole it has been a sobering experience, and makes us realise that without the same sort of pressure that lead to the Garden Cities movement and the New Towns Act - that without some equivalent New Villages Act - we don't stand much of a chance.