A White Christmas...?

It is difficult to really imagine the size of the Vineyard Farms planned new restaurant and visitor’s centre for Green Belt land in Upper Bush. The glossy brochures that have so impressed our local Council planning department and that show the hordes of smiling, happy, hippy visitors lounging around, with Mark Dixon’s Tracey Island in the background, don’t really give an indication of scale.

But this thing is big.

Really big.

To give you an indication of just how big Lord Foster’s Flying saucer is, I’ve taken the architect’s drawing of the above ground restaurant, visitor’s centre and ornamental lake (and remember, Vineyard Farms are calling all of this an “agricultural building” to get it exempted from the prohibition of new builds in Green Belt land) and superimposed, to scale, a full-sized football pitch next to it.

The Vineyard Farms complex, compared to the size of a standard football pitch...

You can see that what is above ground is much larger than a standard football pitch. (Just an agricultural building, remember?  Honest guv'nor.  Just a £30m agricultural building, just like wot you get on any farm, right?).

What you don’t see is the majority of the building that is underground. Under the lake is an 85m x 60m chamber for their actual wine making area, excavated into the hillside to a depth of 12 metres. From the eastern side of the restaurant block, the building radiates out underground for another 30 metres, to a depth of around 6-7 metres for the fermentation tanks and barrel room.

Barrow Hill is going to be essentially hollowed out to create Vineyard’s Farms’ underground lair.

And all that adds up to a simply enormous volume of chalk that needs to dug out for this grandiose scheme.

Simple arithmetic (and a bulking factor of 1.4 for chalk) shows that volume to be in the region of 160,000 cubic meters! 

This is a very conservative estimate, and does not include any of the likely required foundation works, or anything else they might be digging up as part of the project. It’s just the estimated volume of the chalk spoil that will have to be dug out for the underground caverns, based on the dimensions given in the architectural drawings.

In Section 5.1.5 of their Construction and Environmental Management Plan (CEMP) they admit that "the total material that will be moved is estimated to be more than 100,000 tonnes" but they somehow contend (in Section 3 of the CEMP) that:

"Finished site levels have been determined to negate the need to remove any spoil from site. During construction, should any excavation spoil be unearthed that cannot be re-used this will be removed from site and disposed of at a suitable licensed waste transfer facility..."

Unless they are planning to just pile up the chalk in ugly, white swathes everywhere in Bush Valley (which would actually fit in with the devastated, torn-up valley they have already ploughed up for their vines), this claim doesn’t seem to stand up.

The excavated chalk would cover a standard football field to a depth of 32 metres (100 feet).

Spread to a depth of 1 metre, it would cover 40 acres, or 12% of the whole of Bush Valley.

The top soil cover is pretty thin, and even if they kept all of the top soil from the above ground restaurant area and the car park, they will only have about 10,000 cubic meters to play with. That will only cover about 50,000 square metres of spread-out chalk spoil to a soil depth of around 8 inches  - about a third of the chalk dug out, even if it was spread as thickly as one metre around the valley.

It is clear that they will have to lift the top soil off of a huge area of Bush Valley just to bury their spoil.  The mess, the disturbance, noise, air-borne dust and sheer ugliness this will cause for a few years is entirely predictable. Poor old Cuxton, and particularly Upper Bush, have been through it all before. It will be on a similar scale to the way Dean Farm valley was despoiled forty years ago...

Dean Valley, top soil removal in the early 1980's - soon to be repeated in Bush Valley?

As above...

It's just not practical to import more top soil or export a lot of chalk off site. They’ll need another 20,000 cubic metres of top soil (or around 700 lorry loads!) imported to site to cover their chalk spoil even if they do spread it pretty thickly. That’s a lot of extra traffic that’s not included in any traffic plan. You can multiply that by five if they have to take the excess chalk off site.

Vineyard Farms have so far managed to bamboozle Medway Council planning department, but fortunately some of the other councillors on the Planning committee are becoming wary of the smoke and mirrors approach of Vineyards Farms in trying to hide the more inconvenient, vague or impractical aspects of their grandiose aspirations.

Vineyard Farms need to be pushed on a lot more detail on how they plan to manage their excavation (as well as a lot of other things). But will anyone get an opportunity to do so?

If they get their way, Bush Valley could be afflicted with a White Christmas – for ever!