Last year we asked all of you to object to a planning application from the local Golf Club to build a car park on the site of the battlefield.
Many of you did and in the end there were 217 objections. Thanks very much to all of you who took the time to write.
Since then things have moved on. The application was scheduled to be dealt with by the local planning committee last week. If you objected you should have had a letter offering you the opportunity to attend.
However the Golf Club withdrew the application at the last minute. This might sound like good news but for those of you who don’t understand the labyrinthine ways of the English planning process it actually isn’t.
You see the Club were going to lose. The application was inappropriate and the “Heritage Assessment” they paid for was a joke. Local press was opposed and then there was also all those objections. If they’d lost then that was it, pretty much.
What the Golf Club have decided to do is withdraw the application and resubmit a completely new one. This will mean that all the objections and work opposed to the old application won’t count any more. They now know all the reasons for objecting to the application, so they may well be able to deal with them in the new application which they will probably introduce on a shorter time frame.
What this means is that some time over the next few months I’ll probably be asking you all to object again and we will be hoping that you won’t be bothered because you did it last time. If the objections drop then the Golf Club will be able to argue that they have addressed the concerns of the community and interested parties.
In the interim what can you do? If you aren’t already a member of the Northampton Battlefields Society you could join (find us on Facebook). Membership fees go towards the costs of running the Society and organising opposition to damage to the local battlefields.
Or, if you haven’t bought a copy already, buy Mike Ingram’s book about the battle, available through Amazon: link
Profits from the book go into the Society’s fighting fund.
Thanks everyone for you support so far,
Graham Evans NBS committee member and editor of the NBS newsletter ‘The Wild Rat’
Northamptonshire Battlefields Society 