A group of not especially well-qualified individuals gathered in Ludlow last week to make a decision that could set a precedent for the gradual erosion of the architectural and historical integrity of one of the few remaining, least spoilt medieval towns in Britain. They had to decide whether they were for or against an application to erect five “executive” houses in a central site, almost entirely inaccessible and immediately adjacent to two of this town’s most historic buildings. Even well-conceived dwellings, designed to be sympathetic to their venerable neighbours, would be intolerably damaging. In this case the proposed houses are pedestrian, unvernacular and entirely without architectural merit.

The sole driver of this application is the grubby, small-minded greed of opportunistic developers and the current freeholders of the unlikely site – formerly the gardens of the Reader’s House, one of Ludlow’s most distinguished dwellings – seeking to maximize their profits on a lucky purchase of the garden at a knock down price. They manifestly have no interest in the town’s quite exceptional architectural and historical qualities; they are insensible to the overwhelming feelings of disgust of the inhabitants of the town, and have no regard for the massive disruption to the life of the town that their development would cause. 

The site has deliberately been allowed to become derelict, and a sliver of land adjoining it, backing on to two shop premises on King Street, has been included in the application. The developers, an individual called Andrew Sheldon and Shrewsbury architect, Graham Moss, hold an option to buy the site for £150,000 (the bulk of the ground – the abandoned garden – is currently owned, and was bought for just £3,000, by Alexandra Countryside  Developments (Robert Hughes and Charles Grant, who also own 9/10 King Street). The background to this extraordinary deal is obfuscated, and I would be grateful for more information regarding it; on this blog or privately via peterhenryburden@gmail.com)

The brief look at the history of this attempt to implant a large ugly wart in the very centre of Ludlow shows that the first application for a slightly higher density of dwellings was turned down by the then planning authority, South Shropshire District Council, only to be appealed to the DoE, whose inspector under deliberate misguidance, and to the astonishment and consternation of a huge majority of voters in the town, saw fit to allow it.

This plan turned out to be unbuildable, and the developers, emboldened by their first permission, have submitted a second, fresh plan. Some councillors – whether because they are friends or have connections with the developers, or are pusillanimous, or just plain dim is uncertain – were persuaded that as there was an extant, albeit entirely separate permission in situ, there was a financial risk to the Council in refusing this new one. With the help of the Chairman’s casting vote, these councillors passed this entirely irrational and unnecessary proposal to wreck the centre of an important historic town.

To put it into context, there is no pressing need for this additional housing in a town that has been extensively provided with new housing over the last decade – some still unsold –and where, anyway, several prominent, eminently suitable brown field sites exist as and when the need occurs.

Nor is it an exaggeration to describe this site as inaccessible. It would be hard to find a place less suited to any kind of development, let alone the building of five complete houses. A manner of transporting all the material and equipment required has yet to be identified. On the face of it, everything will have to be manhandled across St Laurence’s church yard, approached by narrow streets, in one case completely impassable by heavy goods vehicles.

The allowing of this gross, impractical plan shows local democracy in a very poor light, and points up the abysmal lack of taste, judgement and historical perspective among a majority councillors on Shropshire Council’s Strategic Planning Committee. It was committees like this that compounded the Luftwaffe’s efforts in the wholesale destruction of the once beautiful, now largely hideous cities of Gloucester and Worcester. Look at these cities and, closer at hand, the butchery that took place in the medieval heart of Shrewsbury in the 1960s; look at the two more recent major developments allowed by the local planning committee in Ludlow – Tesco and the Library, an ugly, out of scale and dysfunctional building – and ask yourself if you should lightly let them get away with it again.

I invite any assistance and provable information in building the case against this development in the hope that a chance to quash it becomes available. In the meantime everything possible that can be done, without breaking the law, to dissuade Messrs Sheldon and Moss from carrying through their plan is to be encouraged, and a careful eye must be kept for any signs of pre-emptive actions by them to breach the wall that marks the curtilage of St Laurence’s Church. The developers cannot commence without gaining access at several points along the wall, and the ownership of the wall is uncertain, however, that is in the process of being established and it most probably belongs to the Church, and the Diocese of Hereford have expressed their clear opposition to the scheme. There is a good chance that they can stop this development; I hope they do all they can to achieve this.

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s hard to fathom the motive behind a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s early morning ‘outdoors’ programme, Open Country. Richard Uridge’s (usually competent and engaging, if cliché-spattered) commentary on the strawberry factories of Herefordshire sounded like a big puff for the socio-economic virtues of strawberry-growing vandals, S & A Davies Ltd.
The programme focused on the value to the local economy of the large influx of eastern European migrant workers (some of whom have become permanent residents).
I have no objection to this influx. On the one hand it has swelled congregations among the local Catholic churches; on the other it has provided the delights of seeing in the area a plethora of slender, beautiful young eastern European women who have grown up on food-balanced diets without the excesses of fat and stodge, unlike the generally overweight, flabby indigenous ladettes that roam the streets of Hereford Leominster and Ludlow.

But this does not justify covering hundreds of thousands of acres of Herefordshire with hideous, landscape destroying white plastic tunnels, which cost millions in lost tourist business and produce in the end a fruit that is a strawberry shaped ball of cotton wool. It has marginalised most of the surrounding traditional, seasonal (and far more delicious) strawberry growers.
I refuse, for reasons of taste and principle, to buy or eat a plastic nurtured strawberry and those who love the traditional British landscape of Herefordshire should do the same. There’ll always be other jobs for hard-working Poles, Lithuanians or Bulgarians, if that’s what they want. The local under-achieving youth aren’t going to bother with tough physical work when they can draw the dole, draw disability benefits for being too fat, drink cheap Tesco Alcohol and play video games all day, are they?

I expect Richard Uridge will soon be putting the other side of the story – what the tunnels are costing the county to achieve the benefits he was promoting.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The idea of reproducing, in an arena like the Circus Maximus, a race between half a dozen highly-tuned quadricas (the observant among you will have spotted Boadicea driving one with four fresh-looking animals across the top of Hyde Park Corner) was a well-formed fantasy of mine in my foolish, romantic 20s. Evidently, German impresario Franz Abraham has not grown out of his version of this fantasy. He claims to have staked his all on the realisation of his dream, Ben Hur Live at the O2 Arena; if it’s a flop, he’s said, he’ll be ruined. Poor old Franz. After reading the reviews and seeing some clips of the show on the net, it looks to me as if ruination could well be on the cards. After all, it’s reported that the ‘chariot race’ -  the apogee of the whole show, surely – lasts a mere two minutes – not long enough to deliver satisfaction of any sort.

   If only Franz had sought to work out his fantasies in a more manageable way, like the surprisingly adventurous Lord (David) Lipsey, who despite his credentials as an economist, financial journalist and adviser to the Labour government, has seen the fulfilment of his equine dreams by owning and driving his own trotting horses, and, much to the amazement of the Welsh trotting folk who sold them to him, winning with them.

Driving trotters (or “pacers”) from a flimsy sulky, as practised in mid Wales and the Marches, is (I’m told) a seriously gut-churning experience and, even without Charlton Heston to whip it up, provides as exciting a spectator sport as you could see in any public arena, which, without the spinning axle blades to slice an opponents’ spokes, has it over Roman chariot racing as far as our Health & Safety minders are concerned.

I love the trotters, and persuaded my friends, John & Carol Challis that they too should experience the rough and tumble of the Mid-Wales and Border Counties Trotting Association – an organisation with a pleasingly slender rule book (unlike their more fastidious cousins, the British Harness Racing Club). Given John’s alter ego, since 1981, as Boycie in Only Fools and Horses, he risked the tabloid headline, “Boycie visits the Trotters” but agreed to traipse across country to the Bell in Almeley, west Herefordshire, where we met Ray Thomas, landlord of the Lion Hotel in Llanbister, builder, farmer, horseman, traveller and polymath, who had a runner in the pre-novice race and whom I’d asked to mark our card for the day. He led us off to a nearby field in which a few Portaloos and a beer tent had been erected for the races. A course was laid out with sporadic wood posts and lengths of rope. A flat bed trailer by the winning post accommodated the judges and the commentator. A race card offered the runners and rivers for a dozen or so trials of speed.

Trotting is not a traditonal activity of the tweed-and-Barbour Range-Roving classes; it is run and watched by unsophisticated, sturdy Celtic folk – skilled, tough and canny they are too, though not always as canny as the bookies that come out to take their money each week. Neither the bookies nor the punters, though, can ever be sure who’s trying to do what, and both rely on assessing the whiteness of the knuckles of the drivers of the runners-up in the earlier heats, so as to know how to skew the odds in the finals.

A lot of the punters, it turned out, were also fans of Only Fools and Horses, and John was asked ceremoniously to leave his imprimatur (or, at least, Boycie’s) on the bar of the beer tent that does the rounds of the border trotting meetings.

There’ll never be trotting at the O2 Arena, thank God, and with luck it will remain our Marcher country speciality for some time. The season’s more or less over now, but if you’d like to see some real, live chariot racing, make a note that the premier meeting of the year takes place at Pen-y-Bont in Powys, over a wonderful, ramshackle course, complete with clapboard Grandstand and known as the Wembley of the West, on the first Wednesday of August. You won’t need your Ascot hat, but you’ll see as much sport.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Sir David Frost is and has been many things, but he is not Art, Music or Drama, which are loosely assumed to be the key criteria for inclusion in Ludlow’s annual festival, and there seemed no obvious reason for his appearing here. But this festival has become something of a cultural potpourri, and it’s hard to find a coherent theme in the choices made by the organisers. I’ve said this before, but of course, in some ways this doesn’t matter at all. They booked Frost for “An Audience with Sir David Frost (Followed by a Q&A session)” at Ludlow’s Assembly Rooms and I went along quite uncertain of what to expect.

To start with it turned out to be a truly enjoyable nostalgia trawl through ‘60s television satire, of which David Frost was the principle pioneer. Showing some evocative clips from That Was The Week That Was, and the Frost Report, he was obviously relishing his role in bringing so much great and subsequently famous talent to the screen for the first time – like Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, John Cleese, Ronnies Corbett and Barker.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Last week Opera (see Mozart Rusticana); this week Flamenco in, of all unlikely places, the Georgian Assembly Rooms in Ludlow which still function as the town’s entertainment centre.

I’ve always been attracted to the musical subtleties and sheer physicality of flamenco music and dance and I have regularly promised myself a short sojourn in Seville, to be spent in small, smoky bars where guttural singing and harsh guitar chords echo off low vaulted ceilings – a promise which I have so far failed to keep. With a strongly held view that raw peasant culture like this doesn’t export easily, I had doubts that this powerful musical form would convince when performed on the stage of a provincial English theatre.

Popularity: 1% [?]