Why We Are Campaigning

By William Cash

The ancient parish of Morville, just west of Bridgnorth on the A458 Shrewsbury road, has no shops, or even a post-office - just the Acton Arms pub. For centuries the centre of village life has been based around Morville Hall and its church. Set in historic parkland at the bottom of a steep hill, known as Meadowley Bank, I regularly walk up and down this hill from my home at Upton Cressett, following a medieval path through the ancient woods. When you get to the crest of Meadowley at the top and emerge on the Jack Mytton Way, you can look out across much of Shropshire.

On a fine day, you can see as far as the Malvern Hills, as well as the Wrekin and Wenlock Edge. Shropshire Hills Tourism describes these ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ of A.E Housman fame as ‘one of Britain’s finest landscapes’, adding that it is ‘a magnificent view, one that has undoubtedly been admired for a millennia and more’.

Yet this historic landscape that also inspired PG Wodehouse (born near Bridgnorth) to write his Blandings novels set in the ‘paradise’ of Shropshire is now under serious threat following a proposal to build giant industrial wind turbines on a ridge at Meadowley. We know that developers and farmers are planning more wind farms around the west Bridgnorth hills and Morville. This could turn one of the most beautiful and unspoilt parts of Shropshire into a wind farm forest.

To get the size of these tax- subsidised modern Goliaths into perspective, the proposed turbines are 80metres high, making them tower above Nelson’s Column — the equivalent of an industrial steel skyscraper. The width of the rotar blades match the wingspan of a jumbo jet. The tallest oaks in Shropshire grow to about 40 metres in height; so the turbines will overwhelm and disfigure the natural landscape with dire effects. Sharenergy, the energy company, are calling it the ‘Crida’ wind project, although such a place does not exist.

Needless to say, the narrow rural single track lanes and ancient hedgerows – where cars and tractors sometimes have to back up for hundreds of yards in order to pass each other – around Meadowley and the Bridgnorth hills are wholly unsuitable for any sort of industrial development. Especially the transportation of turbines on convoys of diesel guzzling haulage lorries the size of an aircraft carrier.

When I recently had a cast iron bath delivered to Upton Cressett, the lorry driver had to reverse back down Meadowley Bank as he could not get up the steep, narrow, lane without danger of the load being shedded. Coaches do not even attempt to reach Meadowley whose sharp hairpin bends are used by professional British cycling teams in training for mountain climbs.

The current unspoilt landscape around Meadowley has a skyline which includes the tower of Chetton's St Giles church, famed for its bells, and Clee Hill. At Upton Cressett, there is the 12th century church of St Michael and the turreted Elizabethan gatehouse of the Grade II* listed manor, a flourishing writers’ and artists’ retreat which also puts on concerts and open air Shakespeare for the local community.

National planning policy states the 'the setting of a building' is a key element to be protected through planning controls; it also states that any harm to Grade I and Grade II* builds or their setting should be 'wholly exceptional'.

This application claims to be a ‘community’ project. But all it has done has enraged many members of the local community who feel they have a right to enjoy the peace and serenity of the natural environment and historic setting of the villages where they chose to live. It is exactly this character of English villages and the countryside that the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) is vocal about protecting.

At the end of the day, this debate is not simply an argument about lowering carbon emissions, killing birds, or shadow flicker, or turbine energy output, or destroyed local property prices – which the Sunday Times say can be reduced by 40% (along with no compensation) if a residential area becomes degraded as being suitable for wind farm development.

This is a debate about the need for fair planning guidelines, transparency, local democracy, social justice, and the basic right of communities not to have the quality of their lives – and value of their houses - wrecked by years of traffic chaos, health problems, mutilation of the local landscape. It is about the basic right that hard working people have to enjoy sitting out in their garden in the summer evening without knowing that they have been bullied into being subjected to hearing the interminable whooshing and whining noise of turbines switching on and off as the weather changes. People who live close to turbines have described the whining noise as starting up as like ‘an aircraft engine about to take off’.

When my plumber fitted my cast iron bath – eventually delivered up Meadowley in a transit van – he said that he has a cousin in Ireland who can hear local wind turbines from nearly two miles away.

Photo credit: The Severn at Bridgnorth ©kcegginton

Shropshire County Council (SCC) has always fearlessly protected the priceless heritage and tourism value to the county's economy. They rightfully objected to the National Grid’s proposal to erect industrial pylons across much of north Shropshire. We are hopeful that regional planning laws – both existing and as in the Localism Bill - will give proper and rightful protection to local heritage sites and landscapes critical to safeguarding local tourism. It is for this reason that a proposal to build a wind farm close to Grade I listed Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdonshire was recently rejected by Huntingdonshire District Council who are now teaming up with the local protest group to fight the wind developers on appeal.

The Meadowley proposal clearly contravenes current planning guidelines.

In its paper, Wind Energy and the Historic Environment, English Heritage state that planning permission for projects which affect Scheduled Monuments, Conservation Areas, Listed Buildings and the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest should be granted 'only where the area will not be compromised by the development, or where any significant adverse effects on the qualities for which the area has been designated are clearly outweighed by the development's environmental, social and economic benefits'.

So let’s examine the Sharenergy proposal. They are proposing a wind farm that cuts right across the Jack Mytton Way, Shropshire’s ‘flagship’ tourist trail for thousands of riders, walkers and cyclists; that is within a kilometer of Upton Cressett, a Scheduled Monument that is one of the area’s most important historic houses, along with an important Norman church, close to the site of a medieval village that is a registered Site of Special Historic Interest. Combined with the fact that the ‘unspoilt and beautiful’ countryside to the west of Bridgnorth is a cornerstone of Shropshire’s historic, equestrian and literary tourism, and that the Meadowley Woods are home to various protected species of wild owl, not to mention rare medieval bats, suggests that the Crida project developers didn't do much homework.

Incredulously, not one of these facts is referred to in the Crida planning proposal or website. All they have come up with is a raptor that may be threatened. But in this 'land-grab' mentality where farmers and landowners across the country are being approached by speculative developers offering ‘option’ contracts on land worth £100,000 per annum for a few turbines, is anybody surprised?

Such economics are causing social divisions and anger as once harmonious rural villages and local communities are being torn apart as people rally around try to defend themselves against an encroaching and unwanted plague of planning applications ‘It’s a very British revolution’ says Adrian Snook, CEO of Stop The Spin, a group that campaigns against ‘inappropriately’ placed wind farm sites. ‘The English countryside has not seen anything like it since the Enclosure system defiled rural life.’

 

The tragedy is I have sympathy for the farmers; who in their right mind wouldn’t be tempted by such offers? As one wealthy Shropshire landowner, who refuses to build a wind farm on his county land, said privately: ‘The amounts of money we are being offered just makes a mockery of farming as we know it’.

The problem is the current government policy on wind farms (initiated by Ed Miliband when Climate Change minister under Labour who absurdly likened being opposed to wind farms as like ‘not wearing a seatbelt’) does not take local community feeling sufficiently into consideration. The British people do not like being bullied into submission without a fair vote, especially when it comes to enjoying the beauty of our natural skyline.

The sky has always been sacred in England – much like Common Land before the Enclosure system was introduced by landowners that robbed rural villagers of their right to plough village land and meadows. Like this community land, our stunning Shropshire skyline and scenery used to be considered a community asset that nobody owned. No more. Suddenly developers and salesmen from outside the county think they own our sky, and that they have the right to stick up clusters of Golgotha-like turbines – not to mention the decimation of local lanes, hedgerows, bridle-paths in their industrial construction - that will ruin what we most cherish and love about our ancient scenery around Bridgnorth.

This is wrong and undemocratic. The reason that we are fighting hard to save our landscape is that around 75% of planning applications for wind farms around the country are currently being rejected by regional councils. That is because local feeling is so strongly opposed to them. We don’t like being told something is a ‘community project’ when it is a commercial project of intangible benefit to anybody other than the outside developers. When Crida did a presentation at Chetton village hall, the presenter couldn't correctly pinpoint where Meadowley was on the Ordinance survey map much to the amazement of local villagers. ‘He was pointing to a ridge that was three miles from Meadowley’ said a local witness at the meeting.

At the meeting in Bridgnorth Town Hall, (the project is co-managed by a pro-wind energy group calling themselves Sustainable Bridgnorth) it turned out that the local head of Sharenergy, based at Ludlow, hadn't so much as bothered as visit any of the Scheduled Monuments, listed buildings or historic sites mentioned above, that would be affected by the turbines. When I asked him if he could actually name a historic house that was open to the public within a five mile radius of Bridgnorth, he admitted he couldn't. But then he is not a local. The sad and arrogant truth is that neither Sharenergy nor Natural Power, the huge, heavily subsidized energy company in Aberystwyth that is project managing the planning proposal, don’t much care about Bridgnorth's landscape or heritage. They care about profits.

One person who does, however, is Dr Katherine Swift, a much respected figure in the local community who lives at the Dower House in the grounds of Morville Hall, where she set her bestselling book, The Morville Hours. It is a literary meditation about creating a beautiful garden against the backdrop of not just the seasons but also the timeless arcadia around Bridgnorth. She has joined our campaign. 'Bridgnorth is the gateway to Shropshire’ she says. ‘To site wind turbines at Meadowley would be a desecration. Worse than that, it would be economically stupid.'

 

The truth is that amount of power generated from the Crida wind farm is token and paltry, and the turbine generator will have to rely on fossil fuel to keep the rotar blades running in the cold when there is no wind. There will be no value to the local community, only increased energy bills, years of traffic chaos and a property blight. We like our part of the Shropshire Hills as they are.

Increased bills, did I hear somebody say? Yes. What is perhaps most galling is that it is taxpayers who are paying Natural Power, Sharenergy and local farmers to build and subsidise these cash-cow wind farms through a hidden ‘renewable’ levy added onto our energy bills called the Renewable Obligation. Instead of reducing energy bills, the Coalition’s policy of heavily subsidizing (currently £1.5 billion a year and rising) ineffective wind farms, often located in the wrong sites, is one factor that has caused our energy bills to rocket.

There is nothing more loathsome than the public having to subsidise 'false science' at the expense of irreplaceable local heritage and tourism. Which is why I admire the Prince of Wales for refusing to allow any wind turbines on his Duchy of Cornwall estate and why he has let it be known that despite his passion for the environment, he will not support any wind farm developments. He has described them as ‘horrendous blots on the landscape’. By doing so, he has punctured the idea that being opposed to wind farming makes you anti-green.

In fact the opposite is true. As Matt Ridley, the respected author of The Rational Optimist, told The Sunday Times in their chilling cover story of July 2011 about the plague of wind farms across the UK. 'I genuinely don’t understand why wind turbines are considered green,' he says. 'They intrude into natural landscapes, chop up rare birds, including white-tailed eagles in Norway and golden eagles in California, and require huge amounts of concrete and steel — all for a small and intermittent trickle of power. What’s more, they depend on magnets made of neodymium alloys which have to be imported from Inner Mongolia and are mined in an especially dirty process involving boiling in acid that produces toxic and slightly radioactive waste. So they are more dependent on foreign suppliers than the oil industry'.

Our campaign is not opposed to the idea of renewable energy or wind farms —especially if they are offshore, or placed sensitively in areas that do not ruin the local economy or quality of life for locals. Despite the fact that there are serious scientific doubts about their working effectiveness and viability, and proven evidence that they deplete local house and cause long term health problems, we understand that alternative forms of energy – especially solar and bio mass, which we support - need to be explored to reduce carbon emissions. We need to act responsibly and with a view to the legacy we hand down to future generations.

But there has to be reason, logic and democratic fairness. Our current energy problems cannot simply be solved by setting wholly unrealistic renewable targets decades ahead in the future, ripping up the landscape, blighting local economies and then thinking the problem has been solved.

In a cautionary speech to the Scottish Parliament on 12th November, Rupert Soames, CEO of Aggreko, the global company which provides ‘temporary power’ to countries and cities when they need energy quickly, said that politicians have turned Energy Policy is an ‘irresistible sand-pit’ in which to play. ‘Talking about Energy and CO2 reduction allows them to project all sorts of appealing political characteristics; clean, caring, modern, technically-savvy, far-sighted, broad-minded; and all this could be achieved without any real consequences, no matter how bonkers the policy’.

There will be real consequences. ‘Desecrating' the very heartland of the historic Shropshire countryside that makes towns like Much Wenlock and Bridgnorth so unique and attractive to visitors and tourists - as well as being the reason that so many chose to live here - is not the intelligent answer. As shown by the experiences of Germany and Denmark, for all the original planet-hugging rhetoric, the practicalities just don’t work. As the influential German magazine Der Spiegel has stated: ‘Germany’s CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram despite all their wind turbines. In fact Germany has had to build many more coal and gas fired plants.’

It is critical that if wind farms are going to be built across the country, as part of a ‘diverse’ energy policy, the sites chosen are the right ones. They must not arrogantly ignore community sentiment, especially when sites endanger ‘historic setting’, local economy, heritage and tourism; and that those benefiting are not simply landowners, farmers and developers who care little or nothing for the damage they are doing to our landscape and local community’s sense of wellbeing.

Leadership and sense is required from regional planning officers and authorities. If the government does not provide local planning officials with sensitive and well thought out guidelines as to how Britain must manage its questionable commitment to spend £100 billion on renewable energy by 2020, then England’s green and pleasant land is in serious danger of becoming a 21st-century version of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’.

With the Localism Bill looming, there is an urgent need for a co-ordinated and sane national policy with regards to the positioning of wind farms. No where is this more needed than in Shropshire where an opportunistic and speculator driven ‘land rush’ – similar to the plague of ill-suited wind farms applications in Northamptonshire - is causing a boom of applications driven by profit making incentives that encourage developers to site turbines just 500 metres from people’s homes, as is the case at Meadowley and Underton. This unacceptable proximity (with proven health risks and sleeping problems) allows for a cheaper connection to the grid, giving higher profits to energy companies whilst robbing residents of their quality of rural life.

 

Sharenergy’s choice of Meadowley also seems to contradict their own site suitability criteria. Their website has a section designed to lure landowners and farmers to become clients. ‘If you are a private landowner or a business, sharenergy can also work for you. For example, you might have a site which would be ideal for a renewable energy project: a hilltop with high winds and no near neighbours perhaps’.

No neighbours perhaps ? Nice idea. In their presentation, however, Sharenergy have deliberately used an Ordinance Survey map that is years out of date and wholly misrepresents – by half - the number of houses and residents at Meadowley and Underton, especially those closest to the turbines. This is typical of the arrogance and ignorance of the developers who believe that the government’s support for wind farms is such that local people will be forced to accept their proposals whatever happens.

The reason that Sharenergy are only applying initially for two 80 metre high turbines at Meadowley is that they believe they can sneak the scoping proposal past Shropshire Council by claiming that the impact of just two turbines is ‘insignificant’. Once permission is granted for a pair, then a precedent will be set in downgrading the local area around Bridgnorth as being suitable for wind farming and property prices (according to the Sunday Times) reduce by up to 40% in areas close to the turbines, or potential turbines. Who wants to live next to an industrial park of noisy man-made structures the size of giant cranes?

‘People are justifiably upset that the houses that they have spent years saving up to buy could be blighted’ says campaigner Adrian Snook who believes that the government need to urgently re-think their policy on wind farm planning. ‘Unlike with the High-Speed 2 rail link, there is no compensation. You just wake up one morning and find that somebody else is about to profit from your house’s position and proximity to the National Grid’.

We simply cannot afford Shropshire to become like Montgomeryshire, where three quarters of the stunning countryside is to be sacrificed into a wasteland of industrial pylons and turbines to support the Welsh Assembly’s new plans for a 100 mile square grid that stretches from the Powys hills down to the River Severn in north Shropshire.

When the county’s ‘flagship’ riding, walking and cycling scenic tourist path is under threat, described as stretching through ‘Shropshire’s most beautiful and unspoilt countryside’ to discover the county’s ‘secret treasures’, the council have a civic duty to carry out a full ‘Environmental Impact Assessment’ due to what is known in planning law as ‘cumulative impact’. Ever since Crida’s scoping proposal at Meadowley was first announced, there has emerged clear and undisputed evidence of additional wind farm development planned close by which would certainly affect the landscape in a ‘significant’ way. This level of impact requires a full EIA.

This must take into account the important economic and environmental factors – Jack Mytton Way, Scheduled Monuments, local heritage, Grade 1 and Grade II* listed buildings, historic setting and landscape, impact on local tourism, damage to protected wildlife – that Sharenergy have omitted to mention (other than the raptor) in their woefully inadequate proposal which claims to represent the ‘community’.

We will be campaigning to achieve this. We urge anybody who cares about preserving Shropshire’s historic landscape to join our campaign.

As Sir Roy Strong has eloquently argued in his recent book Visions of England, the idea of what it is to be English today is inexorably tied in with the landscape and our relationship to it. We need to learn from other countries across Europe — Germany and Denmark in particular — that are now deeply regretting their former enthusiasm for an industrial wind policy that has only served to destroy an essential and irreplaceable part of their national identity. That has already, tragically, happened across Scotland and Wales. We cannot allow the identity of Shropshire to became desecrated in a similar way.