For this edition of Nimby Watch, James Ball takes us to sunny Berkshire, where plans were afoot to transform the suburban village of Holyport into the UK’s answer to Hollywood…
Alright then, where are we off to this week? This time, we’re taking a trip to just a little way outside the village of Holyport, nestled between Maidenhead and Windsor in the county of Berkshire.
Okay… posh towns, small village, green belt, what could possibly go wrong? It’s close to a full checklist of problem areas for this column, isn’t it? But a business, an investment company called Greystoke Land to be precise, had big plans for the area. It has been trying to build a 650,000 square foot studio space, with soundstages, virtual reality filming facilities, a media village and a 41-acre park, all situated on the delightfully named Gays Lane (and during pride month, too).
I know how this goes: the locals did not welcome this investment in high-skilled jobs and enterprise in their area, did they? Of course not, this is Britain after all. But that’s old news – Greystoke submitted its application in 2022, and the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead had rejected it by March 2024.
No, wait, I really know how this one goes: someone wants to build a studio, it’s clearly a great idea for one of the UK’s few growth industries, local council refuses it, why-oh-why… we’ve done this one before in this very column, haven’t we? Ah, yes – I can see why the story sounds familiar. The previous author of Nimby Watch did indeed write a story about an effort to open up a huge and exciting new studio space a little way outside London, but that was in Buckinghamshire, not Berkshire – in Marlow, not Holyport.
How did that one work out, then? Pretty much like this one, at least until earlier this month. The Nimbys triumphed, the studio space was decided to be not worth risking the greenbelt (even though the site there was a quarry), and in June 2024, Nimby Watch concluded the only hope of fixing problems like this was a change of government.
Hang on, we’ve had a change of government since then! We have, but on this front things aren’t looking good. Central government actually called in both proposals, the Marlow project from last year and the Holyport project we’re looking at today.
Presumably they’re in a better position to see the big picture: filming movies and prestige TV is one of the UK’s few growth industries, and the Labour Government is rethinking the sacrosanct status of the ‘green belt’ anyway, isn’t it? It’s the hope that kills you. Gays Lane is delightfully named and contains some charming woodland, but is mostly a strip of agricultural land with businesses operating already – it has a carpeting business and one doing guttering. Berkshire is full of natural beauty, but this isn’t one of its must-sees.
You’re getting my hopes up, so this obviously ends badly. It does. Earlier this month, housing and planning minister Matthew Pennycook sided with the council and decided the studio project was unnecessary and could cause ‘potential harm to the green belt’. So despite the wish of overseas investors to expand the UK’s culture sector, the Government says no.
Well… that’s depressing. The Nimbys down the road in Marlow are now newly optimistic that even though the Government called in the refusal of those studios that these will also now be rejected.
Do the locals not have a point, though? Why build studios on the green belt? Whenever anything is built in the countryside, someone suggests it should be in the city – but studios like lots of space and not a lot of noise, and ideally some distance from the crowd. And versus other things that might be built, they’re a dream – they don’t need to be tall (Holyport was only 1.5x taller than existing agricultural buildings), they come with skilled jobs, they don’t generate much pollution and they don’t bring in huge numbers of people. As neighbours go, that’s pretty decent.
Okay, but does the Government not have a point, though? Do we really need so many studios? Well, the people building studios think we do, and shouldn’t it be up to businesses to decide whether they can take the risk to expand? If we don’t build modern studio capacity, we can be sure that we’ll lose out on one of our most exciting sectors – because if we don’t build them, someone else will.
You know, I can see a film in this: a rag-tag plucky gang of developers fighting to build huge studio spaces against an entrenched mob of local villagers and politicians. I can see it too. We can probably film it out in Estonia.
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