The fight for Springalls
THE sale of a protected woodland outside Henley on Thames is being challenged by residents, describing it as a ‘backdoor way of destroying the most protected countryside in Britain’.
Springalls Plantation, near Park Corner, Oxfordshire, is a 23-acre site containing woodland and paddocks. It was once owned by entertainer Kenny Lynch and is being sold, with contracts exchanged and completion due in December. The purchasers have already begun re-selling the site, offering up parcels of land of varying sizes at auction, from £30,000. The woodland is part of the Chilterns AONB and is now subject to a tree preservation order, as well as having no permitted development rights. Residents say there is an unexcavated Roman/Saxon fort underneath a part of the land and a high-pressure national-gas main runs across the paddock, with a 15-yard no-excavation exclusion area on either side.
Those opposed to the sale say that the parcelling up of the land was done with the intent of selling it for development opportunity, a claim that the current purchaser, Estate and Land Holdings, and one of the agents handling the auctions, Barney Estates and Auctions, deny.
‘Almost straightaway, the people who exchanged contracts to buy it [the woodland] started to market the whole area as individual plots, as if they were building plots,’ says David McLaren, who lives near the woodland. ‘They did nothing illegal and they emphasised that any purchaser would be deemed to have satisfied themselves as to the planning conditions, but there were enough ancillary nudges and winks and hints to make people think there’s a potential big upside and the price of the plots were far more than they would be
