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What we will be losing if Vineyard Farms get their way: Barrow Hill, July 2021...

Hello. I’m guessing the probable reason you are reading this right now is that the Kentish Wine Vault protest web-site home page has sent you here.

I’m very proud that the protest group has decided that some of my output on this topic is worth reading. I’m also proud to have contributed to some of the other documents referenced on the home page.

I love the local area of Cuxton and Halling, its countryside, its wildlife and its history.  I think my little blog, which I’ve kept for the past five years or so, will give you a flavour of the beauty and tranquillity of the place.

Silver-Washed Fritillary, Bushy Wood, just to the south of the land Vineyard Farms want to build on...

It’s one of the few areas of Medway to have avoided the concrete hammer of greedy developers. Indeed, less than 5% of Medway is designated as “green belt” land. Bush Valley and its surrounding ancient woodlands are also classed as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which indeed they are.

This is a crowded part of the world. We need unspoiled areas like this where we can get away from each other and enjoy the simple pleasure of walking in quiet countryside.

What Luddesdown valley used to look like before the vineyard...

The recent Coronavirus lock-downs showed the value of such places. They help keep us sane.

So I am saddened and upset that Medway Council’s Planning department have decided to give the green light to Vineyard Farms for this development, to be sited on Barrow Hill overlooking Upper Bush.  Fortunately, the final decision still gets to be made by the council's planning committee on March 9th.

I have been following the impact of Vineyard Farms upon the local environment for the past three years and it makes grim reading if, like me, you love the land and its wildlife.

Here are links to the story as it has evolved so far:

It all started when Vineyard Farms Ltd. first bought Court and Brookers Farm in 2019. I wrote about my first impressions of that…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-grapes-of-wealth.html

Luddesdown valley, late evening, February 2019...

Very soon after, we began to get a taste of things to come. First, there was the brutal coppicing of local SSSI woodland…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2019/04/stonyfield-wood.html

Coppicing or clearance...?

…and the scouring of hundreds of acres of formerly fertile arable farmland, the ploughing up of ancient footpaths and the crude flailing of associated hedgerows…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2019/04/holly-hill-to-luddesdowne-moonscape.html

Vineyard Farms treatment of Luddesdown valley, Spring 2019...

There was a brief respite, where the wildlife returned for one last showing…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2019/10/an-organic-interlude.html

A last farewell...

…but the “weeds” were soon grubbed up and next spring, the valley assumed a forlorn, silent and neglected appearance…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2020/06/luddesdown-vineyard.html

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/05/to-luddesdown.html

Bare soil still visible after two years...

Then I heard that Vineyard Farms (owned by Mark Dixon, off-shore billionaire tax exile and hobby-farmer-cum-land speculator) had bought Bush Farm at Cuxton as well. He wasted no time, promptly churning that up as well, though at first not as destructively as at Luddesdown…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2020/05/vines-and-vandalism.html

Bush Valley gets the Vineyard Farms makeover...

I thought perhaps they had learned their lesson at Luddesdown, but then I began to suspect that bigger plans were afoot…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/04/something-wicked-this-way-comes.html

Soil sampling on Barrow Hill, pre-construction...

Sure enough, all soon became clear…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-grapes-of-wealth-revisited.html

Mark Dixon, the owner of Vineyard Farms, puts his spell on Medway Council's Planning Department...

Then we finally got to see the plans. Beneath the glossy “ooh, look, it’s Lord Foster, isn't it all wonderful?” propaganda, the desperate “smoke-and-mirrors” nature of them was all too apparent. Most striking was the outrageous pretence that a £30m restaurant, wine bar, visitors centre (with a wine factory almost incidentally tucked away in the basement) could be called an "agricultural building" (just like, say, a barn or a cow shed) so that planning prohibitions of such developments on green-belt land could be side-stepped…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/09/reasons-to-be-objectionable-part-1.html

Just another £30m farm shop, just like wot you'd get on any farm, honest guv'nor...

We read about traffic “surveys” related to the development that just happened to be sited such that they wouldn’t actually detect any traffic…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/09/reasons-to-be-objectionable-part-2.html

Another day, another lorry trying to find its way to the vineyard along Bush Road...

…not forgetting the “ecological survey” that, strangely, couldn’t find any wildlife…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/09/reasons-to-be-objectionable-part-3.html

The rare moth that inhabits nearby SSSI woodland.  Present on the development site?  We don't know 'cos they didn't look...

…and the other insubstantial and vague “smoke and mirrors” promises, not least about the supposed creation of a few local jobs that hardly justify the huge damage the development will do to one of the last bits of Medway’s open countryside, let alone the precedent it will set for green belt land across the UK.

I thought it was a pretty shoddy submission, to be honest. So, thankfully, did Medway Council’s planning committee, who deferred the decision, pending a site visit…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/12/medway-council-planning-meeting-winery.html

At the meeting, it became pretty apparent that Medway Council’s Planning department were enthusiastic supporters of the Vineyard Farms scheme. Other aspects of the plans raised at the meeting also warranted further scrutiny…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/12/vineyard-farms-raising-stink.html

Smelling a rat with Vineyard Farms "green energy" plans?  Or worse...?

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-white-christmas.html

Vineyard Farms massive hole in the ground. But what happens to the rubble...?

All credit to the councillors on Medway Council’s planning committee, though. Most of them made the effort to come out to Upper Bush to see what they were being asked to approval the destruction of, although the weather did no-one any favours…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2022/01/big-yellow-taxi.html

...if only our councillors had come to Barrow Hill a day earlier...

…and now that the date of March 9^th has been set for the final Planning Committee meeting that will decide upon approval or rejection of their schemes, the Vineyard Farms PR machine has gone up a gear…

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2022/02/dirty-tricks.html

Vineyard Farms begging for support on Facebook.  Saturation or desperation...?

…hence our decision to try and raise our game a bit, although we don’t have the backing of a billionaire tax exile, his corporate business machine and an army of PR wallahs to help get our message out there.

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2022/02/fighting-back.html

Despite all of the efforts made by Vineyard Farms to promote their schemes, and despite having the advocacy of Medway Council's own planning department, it was comprehensively rejected by Medway Council's Planning Committee in March.

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2022/03/thumbs-down.html

Unfortunately, it seems that despite its schemes being clearly unwanted by Medway residents and their elected representatives, Vineyard Farms are intending to appeal against the decision at a Public Inquiry - so watch this space.

Please note the opinions you see expressed here are mine alone, and are not always in agreement with those of other protestors. Like any group of people, we have disagreements about approaches, but we usually come to reach good compromises without the need to get annoyed with each other – curiously unlike those who say (loudly and aggressively) that they are in favour of the winery and who seem to get irrationally angry with anyone who thinks that the Vineyard Farms promised Nirvana isn’t as wonderful as they say it is.

We’re not NIMBYs. We want Vineyard Farms’s wine-making business to succeed. 

Honestly.

But not at any cost.

Finally, here’s a little bit on the historic and peaceful little hamlet of Upper Bush.  It’s supposedly a conservation area but it’s only a few hundred yards or so away from where Vineyard Farms want to build their massive concrete bunker.  It would be a crime if those lovely cottages and their residents were forced to exist in a goldfish bowl as a little side-show for the 70,000 + tourists a year who will form Vineyard Farms’ paying customers, with the area becoming an overflow car-park for them.

https://hallingviews.blogspot.com/2018/10/upper-bush.html

The Old Bakery, Upper Bush...

So thanks for coming here. 

I hope you’ll understand why this development needs to be stopped, not just for local reasons, but for the protection of our green belt land and our wild places everywhere across the UK.

One one final note, I'd like to quote our local historian, the late Derek Church. In the mid 1960's, Upper Bush lost many of its historic cottages thanks to the ignorance of Strood municipal council, the then local authority. Reflecting on that grievous loss in his 1976 book "Cuxton - A Kentish Village" he wrote:

"I cannot begin to imagine what goes through the minds of councillors who can destroy such a place of beauty..." 

Let us hope that, at the planning meeting on March 9th, there are enough councillors with a conscience present so that we do not have to ask ourselves such a question again...