Friday, Feb 05, 2010
Laws that stop an Englishman from having his castle are insane
The Telegraph: Laws that stop an Englishman from having his castle are insane
Some time ago, it was revealed that Mr Fidler had been living with his family behind a large haystack covered with a blue tarpaulin. When the bales were removed, there stood a sturdy four-bedroom house which Mr Fidler had built.
Typically, no one minded that Mr Fidler's ugly blue-topped haystack stood there for years, but the authorities kicked up the most tremendous fuss when the bales came down and his castle shone forth. In the same miserable spirit, they demand demolition.
Posted by devo @ 07:15 PM (1481 views) Add Comment
20 Comments
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1. mick rupert said...
I liked the article - well reasoned and honest - but the calibre of those posting comments seem somewhat malinformed. Unless they are efforts at satire, perhaps?
My favourites are the ones that DEMAND we reduce the population. Someone suggests 30 million. Bit arbitrary, you might say, but you need to start somewhere.
Genocide, anyone?
2. quiet guy said...
Hmm. Very controversial devo. I suspect your're trying to rile some of us. I suspect you'll succeed.
All I'm going to say about the law is that I'd like to see a level playing field i.e. same rules for all.
3. braindeed said...
It all started with the enclosure acts, when devo was just a lad.....
4. devo said...
I suspect you're trying to rile some of us.
No. The article made me think, that's all.
I place planners well below trafffic wardens in the food chain, though.
and lawyers
5. letthemfall said...
"This means that the power of "them that hath" is appallingly strong against the power of them that would like to have. In a free society, the preferable alternative to equality is opportunity. If you deny opportunity, you entrench an inequality which really is unfair."
That is the pertinent paragraph in the article. Planning laws are not the problem: inequality is.
6. devo said...
'It all started with the enclosure acts'.........
let's go back further
in the 16th century the price of grain was relatively low compared with that of wool, so that a great commercial advantage could be secured by turning the arable land into sheep farms. The results were portentous. In many places, as described in the famous passage in Utopia, or by numerous other contemporary authors, or in the preambles of many Acts of Parliament, evictions took place on a wholesale scale, and where there had been thriving villages and a sturdy population of hard working peasantry, nothing was left but waste and ruined cottages, and rough grass nibbled by flocks, running we are told, in some cases to as many as 24,000 sheep, tended by a few shepherds and their dogs.
The dispossessed peasantry having disposed of their small possessions by forced sale, wandered aimlessly away with scant chance of finding employment either in town or country. The stream of broken men and unhappy women and children could not be stayed by all the vagrancy laws the Government could devise, though such laws rose at times to a horrible pitch of cruelty. This was the great Enclosure movement of the 16th century. Enclosure meant then, not the turning of waste lands into cultivated fields, but the conversion of the "fair fields full of folk," of Langland's phrase, into desolate sheep walks
7. braindeed said...
5. letthemfall said...
That is the pertinent paragraph in the article. Planning laws are not the problem: inequality is.
...but, not many people outside this blog care a jot - we like cheap things, cheap services,and those at the sharp end can be dammed ---sad but true
8. devo said...
.... cheap things, cheap services
yes, we liked those
9. braindeed said...
....then there was 1066 - you'd be surprised how much land given as bounty, remains in the families of the victors
10. devo said...
'you'd be surprised how much land given as bounty, remains in the families of the victors'
so i'm reading
wish we'd had wikipedia when i was a lad
for example.....
The Inclosure Acts were a series of United Kingdom Acts of Parliament which enclosed open fields and common land in the country. This meant that the rights that people once held to graze animals on these areas were denied. Note that although the modern spelling of the word is normally "enclosure", the Acts, other formal documents and some place names use the old spelling "inclosure". .
Inclosure Acts for small areas had been passed sporadically since the 12th century but the vast majority of them were passed between 1750 and 1860. Much larger areas were also enclosed during this time and in 1801 the Inclosure Act was passed to tidy up previous acts. In 1845 another General Inclosure Act allowed for the appointment of Inclosure Commissioners who could enclose land without submitting a request to Parliament.
Under this process there were over 5,000 individual Inclosure Acts and 21% of land in England was enclosed, amounting to nearly 7 million acres.
11. greenshootsandleaves said...
Hands up, those who wish to stand shoulder to shoulder (I'm almost tempted to write 'elbow to elbow') with Mr Fidler.
Hands up, those who cheered when they heard grant bovey had been ordered to demolish his helipad.
Planners will of course be seen as the villain of the piece by, among others, a property developer who is in a hurry to move on to the next (usually bigger) project, so let's be grateful to them for wiping the smile off the face of at least a few of the people featured on Homes Under The Hammer, Homes In The Path Of The Wrecking Ball and of course La Beeny's programmes.
12. devo said...
comparing Fidler's castle to Bovey's helipad?
you don't know your house from your elbow
13. mark wadsworth said...
Let's stop attacking "town planners", they are but there to enforce the will of the NIMBYs.
If there was no such thing as NIMBYs, there would be no such jobs as "town planners", we'd just have a few experts who point out which bit is liable to flooding, landslides and so on.
14. greenshootsandleaves said...
devo@12 'comparing Fidler's castle to Bovey's helipad? you don't know your house from your elbow'
They'll look very similar when reduced to rubble.
15. alan said...
"Travellers" have done the same in Essex and there are scores of people flocking to help this "ethnic minority group". Alas, they are not poor disadvantaged underdogs, some of them own lots of property in Ireland!
Planning rules are a pain, but do you really want blocks of flats with no car parking spaces built in your road? Do you want your sewage backing up because people built houses/flats without checking where the waste goes?
16. icarus said...
mark w 10.02 - only flooding and landslides?
I'd be all for planners if they made UK towns as beautiful as some of those in Germany (including ones which were heavily bombed in WWII) and elsewhere on the continent. But one way or another they have succumbed to spiv developers, who devise ways to 'save the council time and money' in return for planning permission that lines their pockets.
17. markj69 str05 said...
Planners Ha. It's the rules and regulations they are bound to. Developers and wealth can always find a way around.
I once enquired to build a humble home on a piece of land near a small community where i lived just outside the village boundary. The response i received was, extremely negative, but there were 2 possibilities.
1. If the property i built was associated with an agricultural business need. (Which it would not have been). Or
2. The property was of significant architectural grandure. !!! IE. if you had enough money to buy the right to develop (Although the planner did say he had never seen option succeed).
So if you have enough money to buy the architectural design skills, you might have some chance. Which is a damn sight more of a chance than the average person. Slightly bias towards the wealthy i'd say!
18. Salamander said...
He tried to break the law by simply ignoring planning rules and then abusing a law that would protect him from those rules. He lost. Tough sh*t for him. It was a gamble he lost. End of
19. mark wadsworth said...
Icarus, I completely agree on West Germany, most towns look nicer, especially from the train, the houses are better built, the flats are bigger, and there is more new development etc etc.
20. braindeed said...
18. mark wadsworth said...
".....most towns look nicer, especially from the train,"
Thats how I feel about a lot of places in the SE