A six acre site next to Adderbury cemetery and the Friends Meeting House has just been put up for sale for £1.5 million (see listing on RightMove.co.uk).
The site already has planning permission for a very large house with 5 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms and 4 reception rooms.
The original planning applications for the site – marked with a red star in the image below – caused controversy a few years ago when Mrs Diane Bratt, Chairman of Adderbury Parish Council, suggested that the residential settlement boundary set out in the Adderbury Neighbourhood Plan could be moved to allow the development.
Mrs Bratt also personally telephoned the district councillors on the planning committee, asking them to support the application.
The original planning application for this site back in 2010 was for not one but three houses. It was linked to an application by Timms Homes for 30 houses off Milton Road and included land (i.e. the field next to Henge Close) for football pitches. This application, and two more subsequent applications, were refused.
One reason for the refusal was the proximity of the site to the Grade II listed Friends Meeting House (FMH). English Heritage were especially concerned that the rural setting of the FMH would be impacted by the development.
Fortunately for the landowner, Mr Jeff Colegrave, and his developer, Jonathan Porter, in 2014 Mrs Diane Bratt appears to have been on hand to provide some helpful information which overcame English Heritage’s objections (see below), and the application was eventually allowed.
Of course, Mr Jeff Colegrave was also the original landowner of the field next to Henge Close, which was transferred to Adderbury Parish Council in 2014 for “sports and community uses” and which is currently being developed by the Parish Council as football pitches.
According to Mr Colegrave, the proposal to use this particular site north of Milton Road for new football pitches originally came from Charles Swain, who was at one time Chairman of Adderbury Parish Council:
“Approximately 8 years ago I was approached by Charles Swain, representing Adderbury Football Club, with a view to renting the land as an alternative site for football fields, given the problems of drainage at the Lucy Plackett site.
“As a result of this, we decided, as a family, to investigate ways that we could turn the land over to the village so that it could be used for sports and amenity purposes. In order to do this, and to extract some value from the land, we partnered with Archstone Homes.
“We entered into an agreement whereby we delivered the land on the Milton Road to the Parish Council as part of the Aynho Road development.”
Once the site off Horn Hill Road is sold, we wonder whether a single house will actually be built – or whether the new owner will seek to build multiple houses, on the basis that permission for residential development has already been given.