What Goes Around...

Upper Bush in summer, before the vineyard...

Events in the Ukraine today seem to mirror those in Czechoslovakia in 1939. After nearly 80 years of peace, we appear once more to stand on the brink of war in Europe. That stark fact puts our own little local kafuffle about the Cuxton winery into sharp perspective. All of a sudden, the annexation of Luddesdown and Bush Valleys by Vineyard Farms Ltd. just seems trivial.

It seems that history is indeed cyclical, be it national or local. I prefer to think about local history. It is so much more comforting.

Fields above Warren Road, summer 2018, ox-eye daisies...

By all appearances, Medway Council have already decided that the Kentish Wine Vault is to be built on green belt land and the area of outstanding natural beauty that is Barrow Hill in Upper Bush. National planning guidelines for the protection of such areas have been waived aside. 

(Update: From Medway Council's Agenda Document for the Planning Committee 9/2/2022, p.79...

“Following the Planning Committee Meeting on 8 December 2021, further legal advice was provided as to whether the proposed development would constitute inappropriate development in the Green Belt. It was considered balanced, however due to the provision of the visitor centre and café/restaurant which would measure more than 1,000m². it was considered that the proposed development would constitute inappropriate development in the Green Belt [my underlining] and therefore accordance with The Town and Country Planning (Consultation) (England) Direction 2021, if the Planning Committee is minded to grant planning permission, the authority shall consult the Secretary of State.”

This is exactly what we have been saying for the last six months! It seems staggering that Medway Council's Planning department have only just found that out. This does not rule out the development from happening, it just takes the final decision out of the council's hands should it be approved on March 9th.)

The Kentish Wine Vault has already been cited as “coming soon” in Medway Council’s bid for "city status", well in advance of the actual planning committee meeting decision on March 9th., so it all still seems a done deal. The independent-minded councillors on the planning committee have been asking some pretty pointed questions of late, however, so maybe all is not lost.  

Whatever the final decision, from a local historical perspective it’s worth reflecting on what we have already lost...

Upper Bush valley seen from Barrow Hill, February 2018 - before the vineyard...

The trashing of Cuxton’s local environment by a municipal council is itself a cyclical phenomenon: it happened in the 1960s across Cuxton, with many historical cottages and buildings being demolished (such as the cottages at Upper Bush, the Old Post Office Row and the Rectory). It happened again in the 1980s, when Dean Valley was given over to Blue Circle as a cement quarry (the latter being another occasion where a rich company used the “jobs” ploy to fool a gullible council into giving it what it wanted).

The Vineyard Farms’ vainglorious £30m concrete bunker for rich tourists would merely be the final nail in the ecological coffin of Bush Valley, however. 

In truth, the main damage to our local countryside has already been done.

Upper Bush, before the vineyard...

Once upon a time in early summer, you could stand at the southern end of Bush Valley, or up on the eastern bank of Luddesdown valley, and look out across scenes of breath-taking beauty. Below you, a great, green ocean of growing wheat or barley undulated in the gentle breeze that always blew there, even on the hottest days. The reds of the poppies, the yellows of the various mustards and hawkweeds and the blues of the chicory and borage punctuated the green fields with splashes of rainbow colour. 

Luddesdown valley, before the vineyard. The white field at top right is down to chamomile, not bare chalk...

A few timorous deer sometimes ventured out from their woodland hideaways to forage among the crops. Innumerable butterflies flew along the pathways. Above, the larks sang and the swifts, swallows and house martins chased each other across the sky. And as evening drew in at Upper Bush, the Noctule bats skittered out from Red Wood and the pale shape of the occasional Barn Owl skimmed over the fields, hunting for shrews and field mice. The peace and serenity of the place was good for the soul.

Luddsdown valley, 2020...

Now just a couple of years or so later, much of this beauty has been lost to the dull, dreary monoculture of the vineyard. The ever-changing arable fields have been deep-ploughed, dragging the underlying chalk to the surface in white, sterile swathes. No more will wildflowers bloom in the profusion they once did. With the wildflowers gone, the insects and butterflies have also largely departed and along with them, the swallows and swifts. The wind-blown waves of wheat and barley have gone, possibly forever. The fields are now covered in ugly posts and steel wires to support the struggling new grape vines, making the valley look like a giant radio aerial and effectively wrapping the land in a wire cage. The larks, unable to fly across the fields because of the wires and the absence of cover, have left. Once alive with lark-song, the valleys felt silent, neglected and dead this summer.

Upper Bush valley, 2022...

How quickly things can change.

It’s not just the aesthetic and ecological aspects of this transformation that bother me now. Given that war in Europe now seems inevitable, and that the UK has to import at least half of its food from overseas, the loss of thousands of acres of prime farmland to vineyards in Kent look to be a somewhat wasteful, pointless and questionable use of resources.

Fields above Warren Road, December 2021: ploughed-up chalk...

Vineyard Farms in particular seem to have destroyed the soil structure on their land. Vines may well be deep-rooted and will probably survive on the bare chalk that has been thrown up by deep-ploughing, but it is highly unlikely that the land could quickly revert to productive mixed arable use in the event of national necessity.

Food for thought maybe (no pun intended)?

Still, the advent of the vineyard is just another cyclical phenomenon.

After all, in the middle of the last millennium, vineyards were once a common feature of the Kent countryside. In the reign of Henry III, it was reckoned that the grapes grown in the Cuxton and Halling area were the richest in England. Like many across the country, our local churchs (St. Michaels in Cuxton) feature the remains of medieval wall paintings bearing a vine leaf motif, although this is probably more reflective of the role of wine in the Christian Eucharist rather than (as Vineyard Farms otherwise likes to boast in Part 3.6 of its Design and Access statement) an indication of local importance of the nearby vineyards...

Medieval mural in St. Michaels church, Cuxton, featuring was is believed to be a vine leaf motif...

Medieval wine (or at least, that which was drunk by ordinary folk) was pretty awful stuff by all accounts, as glass bottles and corks hadn’t been invented back then, with the wine stored open to the air and rapidly spoiling. Flavourings such as honey were often used to disguise the vinegary taste. Locally, a special red wine was produced by fermenting the local grapes with a proportion of blackberries gathered by the local people. This wine was used not only by the Bishop of Rochester (who had his palace at Halling) but was also supplied to the royal household, with small quantities even being exported to France.

Hop field at Upper Bush, 1910...

The mini-Ice Age of the mid-1550s saw the English climate cool and as a result the vineyards gave way to the hardier hop fields. Right up until the 1950s, much of Cuxton’s farmland was given over to hops. The remaining oast houses at Dean Farm and Ranscombe Farm are testament to a local agrarian economy that was not dissimilar to the old vineyards in many respects.

Hop field, Dean Farm, 1938...

It is quite wrong, however, to draw comparisons between the hop fields of yesterday and the all-encompassing monoculture of the Bush and Luddesdown valley vineyards of today. The individual hop fields were far smaller in area, were interspersed by other crops and certainly did not use the deep-ploughed soil sterilisation techniques adopted here to render the ground hostile to anything but the intended product.

Hop-picking, Dean Farm, autumn 1955...

I feel that the Vineyard Farms business model is a vulnerable one. Increasingly extreme weather and the looming UK economic crash (let alone a war) aren’t a good foundation for a fledgling wine business, even one backed by a tax exile’s billions, and especially one that has put such a huge amount of vines so hurriedly into one undiversified basket, so to speak.  

In 2019, Chapel Down put 300 acres of land just down the road at Bluebell Hill under vines. They don’t seem to feel the need to build a massive £30m luxury restaurant complex on Blue Bell Hill, and their modesty extends to a sensible time scale for wine production from their land (2026, unlike the original 2022 boast of Vineyard Farms that is looking increasingly unsupportable in reality).

The Kentish Wine Vault is designed to be a playground for the well-off rather than an actual working vineyard of course, but far fewer people in the UK will be falling into the “well-off” category. That’s another cyclical phenomenon, with even the middle classes becoming less able to afford even the basics as such as food, fuel and housing, and becoming dependent on the whims of their rich overlords for employment and survival, just as they were 150 years ago.

VF won’t be around for long, I’m sure, but for the moment (and if they live up their promises) there will be a hundred or so new local jobs in the offering, which is no bad thing. Not worth trashing our precious green belt farmland for, in my opinion, but that ship has sailed.

In a way, I’m kind of interested to see how Lord Foster’s promised Flying Saucer will turn out. Its spectacular white cow-pat design at least gives it an agricultural feel. 

And maybe VF can aim at the Russian oligarch market instead, giving the impending impoverishment of the vast majority of the UK’s indigenous population.

Grape vodka, anyone? 

References:

pp.5-6, Parish of Cuxton and Halling Church Magazine, March 2022.

p.102, Cuxton – A Kentish Village, by Derek Church, 1976