It depresses me but in all honesty I have decided it’s time to resist the developments of housing around the village where I currently live. Firstly, the already approved development will obliterate the view from my house. The south face of my house overlooks fields all the way to the river. I can see houses in the distance but everything is green or brown depending on the season, sometimes it’s a golden fertile wheat colour.
One day all of this view will be houses. There’s an approval for 950 homes in those two fields you can see. I’ve written about it before here. I do understand the need for housing. I do understand the need to build. I don’t understand approving farming land for building when there’s quite a bit of brownfield site around. I also worry about infrastructure. Where I live the roads are congested already. The main road south through Aylesford has a weight restriction. There is a waterworks and all the shit-carrying trucks pass through Eccles. This is the only route they can take. Pilgrims way has become almost too busy since the bridge connecting the west and east banks of the Medway was built – this was to avoid all the Peters Village new traffic using Pilgrims way, but really all that’s happened is everyone uses Pilgrims Way as a rat run.
There’s around 850 dwellings in the village at the moment. The Trenport expansion would mean 950 more. We don’t have capacity on the roads, the doctors are overwhelmed and there are no buses through the village. The whole thing is a shit show. I wouldn’t mind I suppose if we actually built high density housing but we don’t. We build shitty detached houses with too few parking spaces. We need urban development that is concentrated. We need to build like the old towns. We need to have housing that blends with the feel of the local area. What we don’t need is the utter shit that developers build these days. I do feel a sense of helplessness about this. Damn.
In the graphic above that I stole from some local newspaper you can see the proposed areas of development. The area marked “1” is already approved and will more than double the size of the village and destroy my calming view of the world which was a large part of why I bought my current property. This development does include so called “road improvements” but the increase in traffic is going to be utter shit. The area labelled “3” is misleading as it’s mostly a large lake. There will be houses built there, for “later living” which I assume is for retirement people. If’ I’m being 100% honest I can see myself moving to there in around ten to fifteen years assuming it’s bult and suitably priced.
The red area is now proposed for even more housing. only another 200 dwellings. Like, what the actual fuck? This lovely rural area nicely connected to local motorways and convenient for commuting, away from Tonbridge – the authority within which it sits – is going to become a wank-stain. I’m upset about it. Why aren’t we building high-rise buildings on brown field sites? Time to get out I think. Time for me to have a run around the countryside and appreciate it before the cement trucks start arriving and plaster the area in dust and concrete.