For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re off to a village that thinks one more home is one too many…
Where this week? Blackheath.
Oh, good bit of town that, nice walk up from Greenwich, some lovely pubs. Not that Blackheath.
Oh. This is the one that’s in Surrey, rather than the one that was in Kent. It’s one of the county’s smallest villages – just 220 people on the electoral register, the internet tells me – and sits on the edge of the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
A place we should be very careful before concreting then. What are they trying to build there? One home.
One home? One.
Just… one? I don’t know how else I can put this.
Well, I suppose people are very defensive of green space in the old areas of outstanding natural beauty. Oh, this isn’t green space.
What is it then? A pub.
A pub? Well, half a pub, really. Here’s the deal. The Villagers pub in Blackheath dates from the early 20th century, but closed in 2011. In 2017, half of it was redeveloped as homes by developer Lux Homes Ltd; while the other half became what the BBC, apparently terrified of overusing the word ‘pub’, described as a ‘smaller drinking venue’. Now the owner of that venue has applied to Waverley Borough Council for planning permission to turn the remaining pub-let into one more home.
So this is a row about half a closed pub. Yep.
Is it a particularly nice pub? Not particularly, no. It’s a hundred years old, which sounds old, but actually only gets you back to the golden age of the suburban semi. It’s hardly ye olde village inne: quite frankly it looks like a house already.
And yet people don’t want it to become one. They do not: according to the fine people of the Local Democracy Reporting Service, residents of that extremely small village want it instead to be a ‘community hub’. The area’s Tory MP, Angela Richardson, has said that she ‘strongly believe[s] this building will be of greater value to the local residents if it is offered to the community instead of being approved for residential use’. Alas, Guildford flipped to the Lib Dems last summer, so what she wants doesn’t count for very much at this point.
Is the community hub thing even possible? Well, there is a way: the Blackheath Village Society successfully applied some years ago to turn the building into an ‘asset of community value’. That means that community groups get the right to make the first bid when something is sold.
Oh, excellent! But it doesn’t force owners to accept this offer.
Oh, bum. But if they did– They didn’t.
–but if they did, do we know what the locals would have done with it? Oh, there’s a whole website. Their plan is for a volunteer-run pub, ‘possibly meeting rooms and fast wifi’ for those who now work from home. There’d be jobs and discounted food and drinks for locals, plus a share of business profits distributed to the village society.
That all sounds lovely! It does! Although how you achieve all those things at once when the last pub closed due to lack of custom I’m not entirely clear. The website talks of how the village ‘once had two shops and a further pub, which have all been closed for years’, and blames ‘ruinous ownership and management’. I suspect ‘there are not enough people around to make it a viable business’ is a bigger issue.
Well, according to CAMRA, community pubs are more likely to be successful, while the Wonersh Town Council says a community hub would be popular with visitors. Again, though – what community? What visitors? Blackheath is so small it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page, but is relegated instead to a section of the Wonersh one, and that fills the space by listing numbers of individual types of houses. I’m sure this place is pretty, but really, how many visitors is it likely to get?
I’m not sure a single house is gonna change that. It probably won’t, but neither will blocking it suddenly make the pub viable. At any rate: the redevelopment got the green light. As Waverley Borough Council planning officers wrote back in August: ‘The size of the remaining public house, lack of adequate parking facilities and remote location would severely limit future viability for either a community-led operation or a national service operator.’
Tell you where there are some great pubs: the London Blackheath. Perhaps they should put their community hub there.
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