Don’t turn our village of 600 people into a SUPER CITY of 350,000
Tempsford played its part in seeing off the Vikings and the Nazis. Now its doughty residents are gearing up for a new battle to stop plans to concrete the countryside
One of the many things farmer Clive Knott loves about the charming Bedfordshire village where he was born and lives to this day is the community spirit.
‘Walking to the end of it will take me two hours because there’ll be so many people to chat to,’ the 62-year-old muses from the 17th-century listed farmhouse that has housed his family for generations.
It’s the same for most of the residents of Tempsford, which is mentioned in the Domesday Book and whose 600-strong current population all know each other one way or another.
‘That’s what makes the village special,’ says Clive. ‘We all look out for each other.’
Alas, if urban planners have their way – or perhaps more pertinently Housing Secretary and Deputy PM Angela Rayner – that may get a lot trickier, and Clive may require a two-hour slot to traverse his ‘village’ for altogether different reasons.
Why? Because Tempsford, a lovely higgledypiggledy mix of thatched cottages, grand 18th and 19th-century houses and a smattering of more modern dwellings, has been earmarked by UKDayOne, an organisation which describes itself as dedicated to ‘supercharging UK growth’, as the prime candidate for a potential new ‘supercity’ with a population of 350,000 — making it the size of Coventry.
That means a rash of new homes built on acres of farmland surrounding the village as well as at the site of RAF Tempsford.
The former working airfield was once known as ‘Churchill’s favourite airbase’. From here, secret flights were conducted during the Second World War by the Special Operations executive (SOe).
This astonishing glut of new housing would be accompanied by a railway station and possible laboratory space to meet excess demand from Oxford and Cambridge and turn Tempsford into a ‘life sciences employment hub’.
SO IT’S perhaps little wonder that when the Mail visited Tempsford this week, opposition to the plan was almost universal, and perhaps summarised best by parish council chairman David Sutton, a relative ‘newbie’ who only arrived in the village seven years ago.
‘It’s not “not in my backyard”, it’s “not everything in my backyard,” ’ as he puts it, speaking from the 450-year-old home he claims to share with a friendly ghost who wafts across his landing (a young lady clad in a white nightgown).
Indeed, the spectre of nimbyism is one that the village is understandably anxious to dispel.
‘no one here is against sustainable development but when you are talking about turning a tiny village into a massive town, that’s a completely different issue,’ says tenant farmer Clive.
‘We have a core group of people who work tirelessly and generously to make it a great place to live. That community would be gone if this goes ahead.’
It is a community that is certainly hard-fought, like so many across the UK. Tempsford was once home to a post office, a butcher’s, a baker’s and a cricket pitch, not to mention four pubs – one of which, The Wheatsheaf, served the then Prince Charles half a pint of ale in 2013 after he unveiled a memorial to the war dead.
They are all long closed but villagers work hard to maintain the strong sense of community. The thriving village hall hosts keep fit classes, yoga, dog training, table tennis and children’s parties, and every September there’s a popular village fete.
Residents are proud, too, of their rich, centuries-old history and their role in seeing off invaders across the centuries.
In the 10th century it was the Vikings who built a strategic fortress in Tempsford. From here they planned to launch an invasion of nearby Bedford but were foiled by an Anglo Saxon army who successfully saw them off, killing the Danish king.
Centuries later, it was the nazis. SOe agents were dropped into German-occupied europe from RAF Tempsford to undertake espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance missions and support local resistance movements.
Mission HQ – where agents were supplied with equipment and ‘poison’ pills in case of capture – was built to look like a farm building. And cattle grazed on the airfield when not in use to fool German air-reconnaissance.
It was to unveil a memorial to the courageous servicemen and women of the SOe that brought the then Prince Charles to the village 11 years ago.
Of course, modernity has a way of intruding when you least expect it, and in 1966 it was not Vikings, or nazis threatening the village way of life but a new road.
That year, as england celebrated victory in the FIFA World Cup, another section of the newly created Great north Road – later the A1 – was constructed, running right through the village.
PeRHAPS, after that, villagers thought they had had their brush with major change – until now. This time, another enemy to village life has emerged in the form of a Labour manifesto pledge to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the coming decades, creating a generation of new towns.
And it is one pledge which Angela Rayner is ploughing on with, last week launching an independent new Towns Taskforce – headed by Sir Michael Lyons, a former local authority chief executive, and Dame Kate Barker, an ex-Bank of england rate-setter – to recommend locations for new settlements of ‘at least’ 10,000 new homes – maybe many more.
And Tempsford looks to be first in line. This is not least because it had already been identified as a prime development site by the national Infrastructure Commission, which makes recommendations to government about infrastructure needs – long before it attracted the new Towns Taskforce team’s gimlet glare.
For small it may be – for now – but Tempsford is also attractively located, perched in a geographic ‘sweet spot’ between the major employment and university centres of London, Oxford and Cambridge.
What’s more, plans were already under way for a new railway station. And one residential developer Urban&Civic, whose track record includes turning the London 2012 Olympic site into Stratford City, has already acquired options with Homes england to build up to 7,000 homes on 2,113 acres of land around the village.
The options were sold by the Tempsford estate, one of two major family-owned landowners
in the area. The Alington estate, has also sold land to another developer for the building of 4,000 houses north of the village, leading to the Cambridgeshire town of St neots.
It’s fair to say villagers were already unimpressed, arguing that instead of building around a small village, such developments should be sited on the edges of existing towns.
‘nobody would notice those because the people who live there chose to live in a town,’ says David Sutton. ‘The families who live here chose to live in a rural community.’
now, with those numbers potentially increasing nearly thirty-fold, he says villagers are furious: ‘It would be a disaster for us.’
It’s a sentiment echoed time and again – at the village hall, by the imposing church, and on the lanes where many residents young and old walk and cycle for miles.
Take Phil Dover, a retired teacher who lives in a large Tudor house on the main village street that she has spent two years renovating.
‘nobody here wants it because we are a sleepy little village and that’s why people chose to live here,’ she says.
‘It just sounds stupid – putting 350,000 people into a village of 600. I can’t imagine it and I don’t know if we’ll be in the middle or on the edge or what. either way there’s an awful lot of money involved.’
That sentiment was echoed by Jodie Titmus, 33, Clive Knott’s daughter, who grew up on her father’s farm and today runs the farm shop, as well as hosting educational visits for local schools.
Grazing contentedly nearby are her two llamas, Austin and Will, who have achieved a degree of celebrity status locally after being hired for the last series of TV’s Big Brother.
‘It is just going to consume everybody,’ says Jodie. ‘I want my kids to have the same childhood as me, but we won’t be here any more; there won’t be a village.
‘My future is meant to be here on the farm, but it’ll be gone. It’s scary.
‘To me, they don’t seem to value the rural community or farming people. Why not do it on the outskirts of a big city like London. Why come here and wipe out all this history?’
More than anything, it is the sheer scale of the plans which is bamboozling villagers.
‘People have not understood this,’ says David Sutton. ‘It’s like Milton Keynes and Cambridge put together. It will fill every single piece of green space between Bedford and Cambourne and decimate our little village.
‘This is land which has been farmed for generations. To me, this is the Government being lazy and cowardly.
‘They see a chance to build a massive number of houses in a place where they won’t face opposition of the scale they would get if they were building on to Oxford or Cambridge. It’s simply not fair.’
One of the major questions is what, exactly, will happen to the area’s farmers.
MOST are tenant farmers, dependent on multi-generational leases from the Tempsford and Alington estates. They now face an uncertain future – although not all want to blame new housing plans.
Another of the village’s lifelong farming couples, Peter Bettles and wife Susan, are already preparing to move from their tithe cottage after deciding that the farm on which Peter’s grandparents started working the land in 1937 was no longer viable.
‘Since we lost the eU subsidies, government encourages us to grow stuff like sunflowers,’ the 68year-old told the Mail. ‘We’re growing for wildlife now, not for human consumption.’
‘even the sunflowers we grow, we aren’t allowed to crop the seeds, we just have to plough it all back into the earth,’ adds Susan, 70. ‘It’s madness to me.’
Others have a different environmental concern. Richard Infield, 51, a fourth-generation tenant dairy and wheat farmer who leases Ouse Farm and 500 acres from the Tempsford estate with his father John, 77, said that developers were opening a ‘can of worms’ by building on a flood plain.
The Rivers Ouse and Ivel meet on their land, and he points out that the lack of dredging by the environment Agency has increased the frequency of flooding in the area.
‘The fields are under water for months at a time,’ he said. ‘But they see the empty space and their eyes light up.’
Such is the strength of feeling that even the local youngsters are against the idea, despite being deemed to be the demographic worst affected by the UK housing shortage.
Among them is 17-year-old Stanley Birkin-Walls, a college student who has lived in Tempsford all his life.
‘I expect to have moved out of my parents’ house before these houses are built but otherwise I would not want to move. When I was younger, me and my mates would bike on the bridleways and green lanes for hours and it was great.
‘That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be good to have a few more things around here – at the moment we don’t even have a shop. But I wouldn’t want to live in a city all the way out here. I don’t think my parents do either.’
Tempsford Supercity is not quite a done deal yet: Rayner’s new Towns Taskforce will not announce their final decisions for another year.
nonetheless, villagers are gloomy about their prospects of swerving the bulldozers. nor are they in any doubt that if their village does get earmarked, development could be rapid, with rumours that the first new residents would move in before the end of this Parliament.
Still, there’s always gallows humour to fall back on.
As Clive Knott points out, while Tempsford is at the centre of the expansion plans, smaller neighbouring villages will be all but devoured.
‘They’ll be wiped off the map,’ he says, raising a sardonic eyebrow. ‘At least we’ll still keep the name.’
A name which, if developers have their way, may be just about the only recognisable thing left.