By Victoria Vyvyan
It is always a bit intimidating to be asked to speak in front of an audience who are considerably more expert – as was the case what I came to speak to the BIAC conference.
There is nothing worse than listening to someone who pretends to know and gets it wrong. A life rule - if you don't know the difference between a blindside and openside flanker, don't scream ‘go blind’, at the exact wrong moment.
So, when you stand up to speak at BIAC don't pretend to know about planning, however many notes you have been given by your advisor.
I decided to speak about two Cornish villages – both alike in dignity - and both of which I know well as Trelowarren is in both parishes. The point being that they have a very different planning history. St Martin-in-Meneage and Mawgan-in-Meneage are both on the Lizard (this is making me feel like I must explain Cornish place names, but I won't). St Martin, currently immortalised in Petroc Trelawny's book Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey through Western Lands, is the parish of my husband’s birth. Like Petroc he went to Sunday School in the little room opposite the Wesleyan Chapel and enjoyed ‘Tea Treats’ when he was at the village school.
When I came to Cornwall the villages were a little alike. St Martin was quieter, and didn't have to the two small post war council estates, but it did have a shop, two churches, a school and plenty of farms in the parish.
Greener than two cabbages, in the 1980s we applied for planning permission to build a terrace of affordable houses in St Martin. Planning was refused. The plan in those days was to move people to Helston where it would be easier to provide services. After an expensive fight we got a handful of detached houses – all of which now belong to what are in Cornwall called blow-ins.
Meanwhile in Mawgan, some in-fill between the council estates was allowed (it’s a bit closer to the main road) and the village grew.
But St Martin didn’t grow, it grew quieter, and so the shop closed. Methodism, so much part of everyone’s life in the sixties and seventies, declined, and so the chapel was given planning permission to be rather an inconvenient house - which is always on the market. And finally, the school, starved of children, and a tenant of Trelowarren, also threw in the towel.
I’m not bitter about a failed planning attempt 35 years ago, and I am not vain enough to think it was instrumental in the decline of one village, but with the power of hindsight I do think it was, and it remains, emblematic of failed planning. St Martin, and many other small villages across the country, was sold down the river.
The CLA campaigns for sustainable villages. We believe that it shouldn’t be difficult to have policies that ensure a small number of new houses in a large number of villages. These houses will ensure that our communities can, if they want to, live in their home village throughout their lives.
And in the light of the bloodbath this government is set on making of the rural economy, it doesn't seem like a very big ask.