Padbury Field Offered 65 Homes Or One Shop

Plans have been put in for up to sixty-five homes, a shop or community building and some public open space on the land south of Springfields, off Winslow Road in Padbury. The field itself, which in living memory has done nothing beyond growing damp and holding one horse that nobody claims, was given a fortnight to consider the matter and after what neighbours describe as visible deliberation has chosen to carry on being a field.

An invented planning panel calling itself the Single Idea Group has taken the view that a parcel of land can support one idea at a time and no more, and that asking a paddock for sixty-five homes and a shop in the same afternoon is the sort of thing that ruins fields. Its preferred outcome, stated in writing, is indecision, which it describes as the only option with no objectors.

The group met on Thursday to weigh the two possibilities and spent most of the evening on a third, which was the hedge. A man who lives opposite said a shop would be useful if it sold milk, less useful if it sold candles, and catastrophic if it sold both, and he asked for this to be minuted. Somebody else observed that the field has been quietly accepting everyone's leaves since the summer and has never once been thanked, and the room agreed to come back to that.

"We put the houses on one side of the paper and the shop on the other, and then we turned the paper over, and honestly that was the best bit of the night," said a woman who had come for the parking item and stayed out of politeness.

Outside, three pumpkins had appeared along the hedge line, facing the field rather than the road, which the group has agreed not to interpret. The application, meanwhile, remains exactly where applications go, which is somewhere warm, for months.