SAVE WHITEHAWK HILL LOCAL NATURE RESERVE

Brighton Council & Hyde Housing Association Plan the Destruction of local nature reserve in working class Whitehawk

This is a guest post by David Bangs, a local environmental campaigner and member of the Labour Party.

WHITEHAWK HILL

PROPOSED HIGH RISE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT

BUTCHERING BRIGHTON'S SENIOR PUBLIC SPACE

A site for a major housing project has been proposed at Whitehawk Hill, as a result of the grossly flawed Brighton and Hove Urban Fringe Assessment Survey of 2014. The new Living Wage Joint Venture Board (LWJVB), set up 50:50 between Hyde Housing and BHCC, has targeted this site for 217 homes in six tower blocks of equal height to the highest adjacent existing blocks.

OK to chop Whitehawk Hill in two ?

Whitehawk Hill is Brighton's senior public open space and most important Downland landscape. The proposal to build a major high rise housing development at its heart is monstrous.

 It will hack this landscape in two, destroying its integrity.

Would it be OK to chop Preston Park or Hove Park in two ?

If it was suggested that Preston Park or Hove Park be chopped in two it'd be a no-brainer that the scheme was daft.

Because Whitehawk Hill  is next to Brighton's most deprived community it is thought safe to propose its dismemberment, despite the Hill being richer in many public values than those two public parks...in wildlife, deep history and prehistory, for free play in nature, for landscape, Downland views, food growing, foraging, horse racing, dog walking, badger watching...

 

'Fish and chip Downland' and 'cream tea Downland'

Whitehawk Hill is 'fish and chip Downland', not 'cream tea Downland'. That is why it is attacked.

The trashing of Whitehawk Hill is an 'equalities issue', though no mention of this is made by the Council.

2002: Good enough to be in the National Park !

2018: Only good for a high rise housing development ?

In February 2002 the full Council voted for the inclusion of the whole of Whitehawk Hill in the proposed National Park. Though a small group of councillors later got this undemocratically overturned in the P&R Committee they accepted the inclusion of the proposed housing site and the wider hill slope in the National Park.

How come this landscape was good enough for all Parties to agree it should be in the National Park in 2002, and in 2018 it's okay to site a major housing development there?

 

Recreational common / statutory Local Nature Reserve / statutory Access Land / Scheduled Ancient Monument

Whitehawk Hill's multiple public values are reflected in a wealth of designations.

In 1822 the 106 acre 'Race Ground' (a recreational common) was created by deed at the enclosure of Brighton's commons. The deed stated it was for "the inhabitants of Brighton and the public in general", for "racing, exercise and diversion". The new common was not be to "broken up, cultivated, or divided."

In 1923 the 12 acre Whitehawk Camp Neolithic causewayed enclosure was designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument. (SAM) - one of the ten best such sites in the country.

In 1997 the whole Hill was declared a statutory Local Nature Reserve (LNR).

In 2002 the City Council voted to support its inclusion in the proposed National Park.

In 2003 it was declared to be statutory Access Land under the 'CROW' Act (Countryside and Rights of Way Act).

Wildlife as good as Castle Hill National Nature Reserve

The ancient Gorse thicket on the proposed housing site is home to rare and special scrubland birds. It is a well known site for Dartford Warblers, Stonechat and Whitethroat, with numbers fluctuating over time, and with hard or mild winters. For many years local residents have watched Badgers play. Rare insects like the Large Velvet Ant (actually a primitive kind of 'cuckoo' wasp) are present. It is home to the giant Great Green Bush Cricket.

The wildlife community of Whitehawk Hill is at least 5000 years old and probably much older. Its wildlife is comparable with that of the Castle Hill NNR, with Adonis and Chalkhill Blue butterflies, rare wildflowers and pasture fungi (the best assemblage in the city).

Horribly neglected, punch-drunk, but still standing...Will our Council now deliver the knock-out blow to our ancient Hill ?

Whitehawk Hill is horribly neglected and its users sold short by our Council. In recent years it has suffered piecemeal development. - more Racecourse infrastructure, Wyevale Garden Centre, and more - and the neglect of many of the management tasks in the LNR Management Plan (notwithstanding the HEROIC work of the Countryside Service ranger and volunteers). But its wildlife and archaeology still survive.

We should be re-unifying The Racecourse Landscape (Whitehawk Hill / Sheepcote Valley / Red Hill) not breaking it in two.

If this goes through, more will follow

If this proposal goes through it will set a precedent in Brighton and other local councils, for breaking up their core wildlife sites when pressed to find land for housing and other developments.

This is a city-wide, regional and national issue, not just a local one.

The proposals, at the crowded northern end of a crowded suburb, will, if built, drive huge further pressure for a direct road link with the adjacent road system (Elm Grove, Warren Road, Freshfield Road etc).

Pressures to further encroach on the broken fragments of remaining high value landscape will grow steeply.

The need for housing

We passionately support the case for a major drive to build, buy, and purchase back more council homes in our City.

We see whole areas of low density, high cost, under-occupied housing, with privileged levels of private garden space, at the heart, and at the edge of our city, which could do far more to accommodate council homes.

We see major housing schemes go ahead in which the driver is more private sector high cost homes, not homes for the low waged and no waged.

We see major housing schemes go ahead in which the needs of temporarily resident students are privileged over those of our poorer residents, the homeless and poorly housed.

We urge the council to re-focus on driving forward more sites for council homes, if necessary at the expense of high cost housing, student accommodation, and some employment and retail  uses, but NOT at the expense of nature or our cherished public open spaces.

Whitehawk Hill is as important to Brighton as the Royal Pavilion

RESPECT ITS INTEGRITY   CHERISH IT   RESTORE IT

Actions

Write/email your local Brighton & Hove City councillor. (The Council website will give you those details).

Write to/email members of the Housing, Planning, and Environment Committees of Brighton and Hove City Council

Write to/email Hyde Housing. (Go to )

Write to/email the BHCC Board members of the LWJVB (Living Wage Joint Venture Board) which governs the Whitehawk Hill building project. They are Cllr Anne Meadows, Cllr Mary  Mears, & Cllr David Gibson

SOME NOTES

Dave Bangs T: 01273 620 815;  October 2018SOME NOTES

Dave Bangs T: 01273 620 815;  October 2018

Brighton & Hove Council Threatens to Sell off its holdings of South Downs National Park Land

Brighton’s New Labour Council Displays its Hostility to Publicly Owned and Controlled Assets  

Plumpton Hill -  FOR SALE

Those who believe it is better having a ‘Labour’ council, despite it being dominated by New Labour, should think again.  It is clear that the current administration is seeking to sell off to private landlords, with the Duke of Devonshire’s Estates having first option, the 12,500 of  Downland that the Council owns.  Ironically, what a Conservative Brighton Council purchased in the 1920’s and 1930’s a ‘Labour’ Council will privatise today.

On the 8^th December a Council committee will take the decision as to whether or not to begin the process of privatisation.  This was a process that was initiated by the previous Green administration which also bought into neo-liberal free market economics.  If the sell-off goes ahead it will have devastating implications for the future of the National Park.

In the email exchange below, Progress Labour Councillor Tom Bewick, who doesn’t seem to realise that all the land is part of the National Park ,asserts that ‘The council has no business owning non-national park downland.’   Private profit as oppose to public ownership seems de rigeur with these Tories in Labour clothing.

There is a campaign which has sprung up to ensure that Council land stays in public hands.  Join the KEEP OUR DOWNS PUBLIC (BRIGHTON) CAMPAIGN.

Tony Greenstein

Eastbourne Downs Combe Hill

KEEP OUR DOWNS PUBLIC (BRIGHTON)

PRESS RELEASE

BRIGHTON COUNCIL HALTS DOWNLAND SALES

24/11/16. Contact: Dave Bangs, T. 01273 620 815 bangs682@btinternet.com    Chris Todd, ecochris.todd@googlemail.com

We greatly welcome the reports that Brighton Council has withdrawn the remaining at-risk Downland sites from sale. These are: Plumpton Hill, an iconic high point on the South Downs Way commanding views of the Weald north to Ashdown Forest. It is an SSSI (nationally protected wildlife site) and has a Scheduled Ancient Monument (Bronze Age burial barrows) upon it, and Poynings Field which provided the traditional landscape setting for the Devils Dyke.

This is good news for all lovers of the South Downs. It is good news for Poynings Parish Council, who are not now faced with a threat of built development on the edge of their village. It is good news for lovers of nature, and all people who love Downland history, who can now rest assured that the ownership of these sites will remain democratically accountable

We now wish to engage with Brighton Council in a re-think of the way in which our 12,500 acre Estate is managed. We need to end the distant, unknowing, arms-length attitudes which have seen the Downland Estate as no more than a second rate commercial asset, and re-connect to this democratically owned public landscape, which can offer all of us good fun, healthy recreation, companionship in nature, solace, wonder, peace, education...and good, locally produced food!

We urge the Council to:

• Commit to keeping all of its Downland estate and redrafting the Council's Asset Management Plan to say that no future sales should take place. 

• Fully involve the public in the Estate’s management. 

• Ring fence the Downland Estate revenues for the estates’ conservation and for public use, including sustainable access to the estate (the latter point a Labour manifesto commitment).

• Designate all of the Downland Estate as statutory access land as the opportunities arise.

• Adopt a long term strategy of landscape restoration for the whole estate for the social, health and economic benefits that this will bring.

Plumpton Hill

Flogging off the Sussex Downs

Text: 800 words.  27.11.16. Dave Bangs, Tel: 01273 620 815.   bangs682@btinternet.com

In the past months major storms have arisen on the Sussex Downs because of threatened large scale sales of local council owned Downland. On the Brighton Downs the City Council has been ‘reviewing’ its ‘non-core assets’ and attempting to dispose of a series of sites. These include part of a 50 year old nature reserve which is the last county site for the little native Juniper conifer (present on the Downs since the Ice Age); a cave with four resident species of bat; and iconic Plumpton Hill, commanding huge views over the forested Sussex Weald. On the Eastbourne Downs behind Beachy Head the Council has been moving towards the disposal of over 3,000 acres of public Downland which forms the backdrop to the town. It includes numerous prehistoric burial mounds and field systems, a Neolithic hillfort, and large, nationally important wildlife sites for orchids and rare flowers such as the Moon Carrot, which glows white in the darkest night.

On these Downs the local councils are major landowners, having acquired large tranches of land cheaply in the 1920’s, ‘30’s, and ‘40’s during the long agricultural depression. They did so to protect them from rapidly expanding urban sprawl, to protect the chalk aquifer which is the source of their drinking water, and to protect the ancient open sheep walks which walkers and naturalists loved. Whilst they largely failed with the latter objective (because agribusiness farmers ploughed up much archaic grassland that was tractor-accessible) they succeeded with the two former objectives.

The legacy of these conservation purchases is huge. Brighton Council owns some 12,500 acres, Eastbourne Council has 4,200 acres, Worthing Council has c. 500 acres, East Sussex County Council has about 700 acres at Seven Sisters, and Lewes and Adur Councils have several hundred acres between them. This 18,000 acres-plus public Downland forms the backbone public asset within the new South Downs National Park, together with the Forestry Commission’s estates. The National Park Authority itself owns no land. It doesn’t even own a public toilet.

Tragically, the loss of the open sheep walks (depriving the public of traditional access) and the conservative commercial management of the estates by arms-length land agencies like Savills and Strutt and Parker, has meant that the cultural memory of these free and open landscapes has been much eroded. Twenty years ago Brighton’s Labour Council tried to sell their Downland, but was forced to abandon the proposal by a vigorous campaign. Five years ago Tory Worthing Council abandoned similar sales proposals in the face of militant opposition.

Both councils, with Eastbourne, then ‘came good’ and designated huge tranches of their Downland as statutory ‘freedom to roam’ land. Major changes in Downland management brought in much wildlife and heritage conservation and partially re-created the great sheep walks which gave the South Downs its character. In some areas, such as behind Beachy Head, this amounted to superb measures of finely crafted landscape restoration. This was just what Labour Environment Minister Michael Meacher had in mind when he announced the creation of a South Downs National Park at Party Conference and proposed it would be of a ‘new type’- dedicated to the restoration of a landscape which had lost over 90% of its archaic grasslands.

Within the last two months ‘Keep Our Downs Public’ groups have kicked off in Brighton and Eastbourne. In Brighton we have secured a temporary STOP on the sales, and the policy will be reviewed on 8^th December at the key council committee. There we face the current opposition of the Labour leadership (though the sales policy was initiated in 2014 under the Green Party leadership) but are hopeful that this can be reversed. In Eastbourne we face the opposition of the Lib Dem leadership. However, the new KODP group organised a feisty 120-strong town hall picket and a lively semi-public meeting with the Council Leader within its first fortnight. Activists face the task of helping the Council recover the lost memories of its progressive past.

If we lose the Duke of Devonshire Estates (the old property developers who built Eastbourne) will have a legal right to first refusal on much of the sold land. Rich new owners may exclude us, damage vulnerable wildlife habitat, turn the farms over to game shoots  and excluding land uses (like vineyards, solar arrays, private ‘parks’ and horseyculture, with their CCTV cameras and high fences) and press for incremental built developments .

If we win we can drive forward more huge gains in public access (over 2000 acres of new access land already around Brighton) and stitch back together the historic landscape’s shattered tapestry of archaic wildflower grassland in a sustainable pastoral economy.

Across the country similar battles are being fought in defence of public land – parks, open spaces and county council small holdings. The stakes are high.    

Thus does a Labour councillor announce his hostility to public ownership. 

What is "non-national park downland"?...this for-sale land is ALL in the National Park. The backbone of the National Park is the the local authority-owned Downland estates: of Brighton, Worthing, Eastbourne, East Sussex County Council, et al. The National Park Authority doesn't even own the public toilets.

Without those Council estates the NP would lose its main non-commercial partners to carry through it's main projects. Private owners chop and change, exclude the public, manage by private whims and fancies (or not manage at all) and wreck key habitats and features...often without even knowing they are doing so.

On its own, National Park status DOESN'T protect the Downs. It is merely one brick in the wall. Hands-on, accountable, democratic public ownership is the KEY tool we have for driving through the project of landscape restoration and full public access which Michael Meacher (in his speech to Party Conference announcing the South Downs National Park) put at the centre of his dream,

Dave Bangs
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Email Exchange Cllr. Tom Bewick to Various

----Original message----
From : Tom.Bewick@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Date : 24/11/2016 - 20:43 (GMTST)
To : Leslie.Hamilton@brighton-hove.gov.uk, bangs682@btinternet.com, Warren.Morgan@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Gill.Mitchell@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Cc : Karen.Barford@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Tracey.Hill@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Kevin.Allen@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Saoirse.Horan@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Daniel.Chapman@brighton-hove.gov.uk, michael.inkpen-leissner@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Peter.Atkinson@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Julie.Cattell@brighton-hove.gov.uk, Emma.Daniel@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Subject : Re: Downland sales: please make THIS STOP permanent

Thanks, Les

I'm pleased to hear that. The council has no business owning non-national park downland.

The whole point of the Labour Govt giving us National Park status was to protect the habitat that legally needs protecting.

The complete grandstanding and nonsense from the Greens is typical. We need to remind them it is Labour we have to thank for protecting the Downs in the first place.

T
Councillor Tom Bewick
Lead Member, Children, Young People and Skills
Labour and Co-operative Councillor for Westbourne Ward, Hove
@Lab_Westbourne
www.westbournehove.org
 

From: Leslie Hamilton
Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2016 07:00 PM
To: bangs682@btinternet.com <bangs682@btinternet.com>; Warren Morgan; Tom Bewick; Gill Mitchell
Cc: Karen Barford; Tracey Hill; Kevin Allen; Saoirse Horan; Daniel Chapman; michael.inkpen-leissner@brighton-hove.gov.uk <michael.inkpen-leissner@brighton-hove.gov.uk>; Peter Atkinson; Julie Cattell; Emma Daniel
Subject: RE: Downland sales: please make THIS STOP permanent
 

You are mistaken. The selling of  land at Poynings and Plumpton has not been put on hold. This land was put up for sale by the Green administration in July 2014 and there is no change in the decision taken at that time.

Les

 

Plumpton Hill: -  FOR SALE               

Plumpton Hill 

Eastbourne Downs Combe Hill                                         

Fatal Attraction – Brighton Green Party’s Love-in With Property Developers

Brighton Greens Propose the Destruction of Toad's Hole Valley

I remember a hustings held at the Friends Centre in Brighton’s Ship Street in 2005.  I stood as a candidate for the Alliance for Green Socialism.  Although I obtained a handful of votes others, such as the Sussex University student newspaper, judged that at the hustings, at the University and in town, I had won the debates.  Arguments for socialism have always defeated the tired, cliched and worn-out excuses for the failures of capitalism.

I remember at the town hustings  launching into the Green Party’s political pretensions.  Keith Taylor, now an MEP (replacement for Caroline Lucas) for the Green Party and somewhat on the right of the Party, was their political candidate.  He freely confessed when I asked him a simple question, in a quiet aside on the platform, why is it that whenever the Green Party gets into power they jackknife to the Right?  Keith was on the right of the Green Party and sincerely believed he would get elected (in fact he came third in the end, but creditably so).  The  honour of becoming the first Green MP fell to Caroline Lucas and even then she only gained it by little more than a thousand votes.

The local business community just loves the 'one planet' idea of destroying the environment

You Can’t Green Capitalism

The answer to me was simple.  If you take over as the manager of capitalism, then however wonderful your ideas about a citizens’ income and all the other god, mother and apple pie ideas you have, then you are constrained by an anti-human and the predatory economic and political system we have which feeds on war and poverty.  Capitalism is anti-human because whereas the natural tendency of human beings is to co-operate in the quest for life, capitalism sets people against each other.  They call it competition and we see its logical outcome in the current economic crisis where investment bankers competed against each other and the market to obtain as high a price as was possible for their derivatives and financial instruments, regardless of the actual value of their toxic investments.  Of course it was all built on sand and collapsed like a pack of cards.

GREEN LUNG: Toads Hole Valley

Of course the political pundits and right-wing soothsayers tell us that competition is 'natural' - part of 'human nature', as if the latter is fixed.  But read a book on the second world war.  I'm reading at the moment Francis Wheen's excellent biography, Tom Driberg - His Life and Indiscretions.  Dribert, a Bevanite Labour MP and someone who had to live with the perils of being gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal.  His sexuality was widely known about but he remained prey to blackmailers and all the other hypocrital scum that make up the British establishment.  He also went to Lancing College and is the most famous resident of the otherwise boring Sussex town of Crowborough.  Driberg was what is known as a champagne socialist, who was expelled by the Communist Party.  He has a country seat in Essex, Bradwell Lodge and was the first and most famous William Hickey columnist of the Daily Express when Lord Beaverbrook was the proprietor (now the paper is owned by Britain's largest pornographer, Richard Desmond!).

For the duration of the war Bradwell Lodge was impounded for the RAF.  Economic planning was instituted by the Tory led government on a scale undreamt of by socialists.  All this because it was recognised that private enterprise couldn't fight a war of survival.  You cannot have economic competition triumphing over the  battler for national survival.  Everyone had to contribute and you couldn't do that whilst the privileged classes were immune from sacrifice.

Yet today, instead of humanity co-operating in a joint quest to eliminate poverty and disease we have the grotesque and obscene situation of a race to the bottom.  If we don’t pay poverty wages, another country or company will.  If, as Norman Tebbit once said, we don’t produce instruments of torture then someone else will.  Capitalism, as one of the few intelligent speculators George Soros (child of the Hungarian holocaust and an opponent of Zionism who has been called a cog in Hitler’s machine by these debauched prostitutes for American imperialism) proclaimed is ‘amoral’.  It also contains within it the seeds of humanity’s destruction.  Global warming can only be combated by human co-operation world wide.  Instead capitalism, which is notoriously short-sighted, because it eschews long-term planning, which is necessary to combat global warming, instead churns out CO2, eroding the Arctic ice cap and then starts drilling for more oil in the Arctic, presumably so that it can finish the job of frying the world.

It is plain as a pikestaff that you cannot tackle the global environmental crisis as long as capitalism exists.  Just as you cannot guarantee the safety of a child in its crib as long as you have a rattlesnake sharing its sleeping quarters.  The Greens however have no strategy.  To them capitalism is a neutral vehicle and one can harness the market to green society.  So when they come into power they make deals with whoever is around, plead how responsible they are and then get on with the business of making the world unfit to live in.  In Germany, the Green Party under its leader and Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer, was the first German government to send its army abroad to fight (in Afghanistan).  In Ireland, the Green Party disappeared off the political map when it supported Fianna Fail and its vicious programme of austerity.  In Scotland the Green Party showed how loyal it was to the Monarchy by attending the Queen’s inauguration of the Assembly at Holyrood, unlike the Scottish Socialist Party, which boycotted it.

Brighton has always been a political oddity, a liberal island amidst Tory Sussex.  It is no surprise that the Green Party gained its first seat here in 1996 when Pete West took one of 3 seats in Labour's St Peters ward, following that up with 3 councillors the following elections.  By 2011 they had 23 seats and were in control of the Council.  Unfortunately they learnt nothing of other Green Party administrations in other countries nor did they think through what they could do or even whether it was wise to take power.

I remember telling Bill Randall, the first Green council leader, and other Green Party members I knew that the Green Party in Brighton, which in 2010 had captured its first parliamentary seat in Pavilion with Caroline Lucas, was mad to take power in the Council.  They would simply be in the position of administering the vicious cuts of the Liberals and Tories nationally.  And so it has proved as they propose to close down 3 Adult Learning Centres for the mentally disabled.

But even I assumed that when it came to Green issues, the Green Party wouldn’t be seen to buckle and become the friend of the property developer.  Instead the Green Party administration and their leader, Jason Kitcat, have welcomed plans to develop the last major green space in Brighton, Toad’s Hole Valley, which should have been included in the South Downs National Park and would have been but for political machinations.

The Council's plans

I can remember arguing with the then aspiring Green candidate and now councillor for Hollingdean, Sven Rufus, about the Green Party.  He told me it was a socialist party and I disagreed.  It shared many aspirations of socialism but it was a petty borugeois, middle class party that didn’t seek to change capitalism but to tame it.  Instead it would end up being tamed.  Sven  has now lost his co-councillor, Christine Summers, a Christian fundamentalist who voted to oppose gay marriage.

Erstwhile radicals such as Phelim McCafferty, who promised to oppose the implementation of cuts, have become deputy leader of the administration instead!

The Green Party administration in Brighton is beginning to make itself extremely unpopular.  Having done nothing, because there is nothing it can do about public transport, it has nonetheless implemented an absurdly high parking regime whereby it costs you £3.50 an hour to park in  central Brighton, thus ensuring that as few people as possible come to shop or visit.  It has now proposed to develop part of the historic Level in Brighton, as part of its madcap schemes.  And now Toads Hole Valley, where it is the local Tories who are posing as the opponents of development (& to their credit have indeed opposed any such development) whereas the Green Party i now the friend of the ‘eco property developer’.

I have a vested interest.  I help run Brighton Unemployed Centre.  In its 30 year existence we have never been asked to pay the 20% of rates which are discretionary.  But this year we had to pay 10% for the first time ever under a Green administration.  Under the previous Council, I had the blue parking badge for my disabled son renewed automatically.  This year it was refused and despite writing to all Green Party councillors, nothing was done to reverse an officers' decision.  In the end I was forced to bring Judicial Review proceedings against the Council before a High Court judge instructed the Council to hand back the badge.  At times of cuts they Council laid out some £20,000 I would imagine hiring barristers and paying court fees.

I make a prediction.  That at the next local elections the Green Party will do well to hang on to even 10 seats.  The real question is whether the Green Council is so unpopular that it drags down Caroline Lucas, who is a good MP with radical credentials, in its wake.  Jason Kitcat and the rest of the ‘business friendly’ Greens will go off to a well merited obscurity.  Which in many ways is a tragedy because it will allow New Labour, which in Brighton is particularly awful, to come back by default.

Below is an article by a good and long-standing friend, Dave Bangs, who is a well-known environmentalist.  He campaigned long and hard for the South Downs National Park and is the most authoritative and knowledgeable person about the fauna and wildlife of the South Downs I know.  Going on a walk with him on the Downs is to see the ground one treads on and the fields in the distant in an entirely different perspective.  He is author of ‘Whitehawk Hill – Where the Downs Meet the Turf’ (2004).

We now have the prospect of the Green Party administration going in to bat on behalf of the Business Community, with its 'one planet vision' [wonderful how they pick up greenspeak so easily!] and the Conservative councillors and local Tory MP opposed to it!  Strange bedfellows indeed.

Tony Greenstein

Toads Hole Valley...down the plughole?

By Dave Bangs, dave.bangs@virgin.net Tel: 01273 620 815 September 2012

co-leader Brighton and Hove Community Wildlife Groups National Park Campaign 2002-4
co-leader Brighton and Hove Defend Council Housing 2004-7

A decade ago local residents and countryside activists  - including Green Party activists - campaigned for the inclusion of Toads Hole Valley and the rest of the Brighton downland fringe in a new National Park of the South Downs.

- Aided by Green Party councillor Pete West, a coalition of all the Green and Tory Party councillors, plus two pro-downland Labour councillors, won the full Council vote to recommend an inclusive boundary to the National Park right up to the edge of the built-up area, taking in Toads Hole Valley, Whitehawk Hill, Sheepcote Valley and much more...

- Later, the National Park Public Inquiry Inspector included Toads Hole Valley in his recommended Park boundary, submitted to the secretary of state. 

We thought we had succeeded [1] ...and so we should have...for the case was open-and-shut...

- Toads Hole Valley is a ‘pinch point’ on the long chain of the South Downs...almost the narrowest point on the whole open downland chain...which is here reduced to a mere 2.6 miles wide. It is the point at which the integrity of the down landscape is most threatened. 

- Toads Hole Valley is thoroughly inter-visible with the rest of the open 1.5 mile West Blatchington Valley (of which it is a part) all the way up to the Dyke Golf Course. Development at Toads Hole will bring serious visual damage to the wider National Park downs at the point where they are most vulnerable. 

- The A27 bypass – remarkably - does NOT constitute a major visual intrusion to this downland valley...and the whole downland valley is protected from the visual intrusion of the built up area by the spur of Snakey Hill (King George V1 Avenue).  

- Toads Hole Valley had long been judged as of National Park quality, because it was part of the Sussex Downs AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in which landscape standards are the same as National Parks.

HOWEVER, a second National Park Public Inquiry to re-address boundary issues (chiefly in the western Weald) reversed the decision to include Toads Hole Valley.

NOW the Valley landowners and Green Party developmentalist councillors are having a field day

Their mad plans make NO MENTION that Toads Hole Valley was judged to be of National Park standard and is a critical part of that wider, inter-visible National Park landscape. 

- The plans cram built development all up the most highly inter-visible parts of the valley...on the higher ground of  the Snakey Hill spur and up by Court Farm.  

- They put new greenspace (in the school grounds and next to the SNCI slope) down in the most sheltered (visually and aurally) part of the valley...the reverse of any rational policy of amelioration of the wider landscape damage...which would keep all the higher ground open.-

They cram a major road along the bottom of the Toads Hole SNCI slope and shave off its southern tip to accommodate that road – and shove in a mess of cycle ways, zig-zag paths, and a funicular railway.   

- AND THEY CRAM, CRAM, CRAM !!!...700 houses, an industrial estate, a school, a community hub, and an even longer version of the busy Snakey Hill road, 

Why all this madness ?...What is the wider context ? 

- A hyper-developing south eastern region, where the best rural landscapes and the greatest national biodiversity are threatened with destruction, PLUS a low wage economy, PLUS severe housing stress exacerbated by inter-regional migration of the well-off  in search of pleasure and the poor in search of jobs...WHILST the peripheral regions and poorer countries suffer under-development and regression. 

- These patterns of uneven development are an inherent feature of capitalism, and bring with them misery and environmental destruction.

They must be challenged and not pandered to.

A sustainable future for both Brighton and the South Downs depends on redistribution and the strictest environmental protection, NOT developmentalism and cosmetic environmentalism... 

- 60% of this development’s housing is to be not affordable...and most ‘affordable’ housing is not truly affordable. 

- Yet 100% of this development will be environmentally damaging.
- Over twenty years ago Hove planners rejected the idea of housing on Old Shoreham Road at the bottom of Benfield Valley because of the road’s noise and air pollution...NOW the Green Party proposes housing next to the Brighton Bypass with much greater traffic levels, noise and fumes... 

- Organise the community take-over and clean-up of the neglected and abused Valley. We first did that nine years ago...and were praised by the National Park Public Inquiry Inspector for our efforts.

REJECT THIS DEVELOPMENT
PROTECT THE SOUTH DOWNS NATIONAL PARK
....FOR EVERYONE...FOR EVERMORE

[1]...Despite the attempt of senior Planning Department officers to frustrate our campaign by ignoring their duty to attend the Public Inquiry and argue for the council’s policy. One of these officers told me afterwards that they had not attended because they did not want to be seen to be arguing for a reversal of the council’s previous policy...a bit like a senior civil servant refusing to support the policy of a new government because it contradicts the policy of the old government!