Young couple build beautiful cottage to escape rent slavery and live quietly

Norma_Desmond

Out,_Vile_Jelly wrote: »

Hang, is it really in a National Park? There are strict planning rules there for very good reasons.

Indeed it is .

Pembrokeshire Coast National Park extends inland to include the Preseli Mountains.

In our local rag the couple freely acknowledge that they built without planning permission because they 'wanted to live there' and had 'nowhere else to go'.......well I'm sorry, but Diddums!

Rent or buy like the rest of us do.

When I think of the planning hoops we had to jump through when sympathetically renovating our virtual ruin of a house over 10 years ago, this whole palavar makes me furious.

I note the couple were pretty quick to have a child; probably hoping for the sympathy vote and if the Hobbit house is demolished they'll be top of the heap for social housing........

smartn

They knowingly broke the rules, no excuses. Bulldoze the place and charge them for the cost of re-instatement. I've just had to pay my council a couple of hundred quid to process a planning application for a small conservatory on the back of my house (apparently necessary as part of the house had already been extended). We can't just allow people to do what they want when they feel like it, the rules no matter how annoying are there for the benefit of all of us!

ash28

Graham_Devon wrote: »

But why would the farmer sell you the land if he's making money growing crops on it?

Again, I'm not suggesting we should all just be able to build what we want where we want, there needs to be controls, but pretending we'd all just buy land off people and they would simply sell it regardless at the drop of a hat is going too far the other way.

Farming is a difficult life and it's not all that easy to make a profit or a decent income - you see plenty of agricultural land for sale.

I don't think people should be able to build what they want, where they want either. The result could be an unholy mess.

The concern about the couple in the hobbit house, apart from the lack of planning is the lack of building control - how do they know the poles and beams can fully support a water logged earth and grass roof for instance. And why build a one bedroomed house - they have a child and will eventually need at least one other bedroom - will they be able to extend or will they just extend anyway?

I saw a Grand Design programme a few years ago called the Woodland House where the guy who lived and made his living from the woods he owned in Sussex, applied for and got planning permission to build a house. He said the hardest part was building control.

http://www.ben-law.co.uk/

Mojisola

ash28 wrote: »

I saw a Grand Design programme a few years ago called the Woodland House where the guy who lived and made his living from the woods he owned in Sussex, applied for and got planning permission to build a house. He said the hardest part was building control.

If I remember right, the planning permission only applies to him - if he moves or dies, the house has to be removed and the land returned to its former state. Has that been overturned?

ash28

Mojisola wrote: »

If I remember right, the planning permission only applies to him - if he moves or dies, the house has to be removed and the land returned to its former state. Has that been overturned?

As I understood it the house could be passed on to his children but not sold - I imagine that if he stopped working the woods or his children did then the house would have to go. I don't know if that's changed over the 10 years or so since he built the house.

The Lammas Eco village that GD mentioned that has some homes very similar to the young couple's house, all have planning permission and have to provide detailed plans and accounts to the council each year to show how they are progressing against the targets for self sustainability - what they have added to the plot during the year and how they can earn £3k per adult from the land.....and they have 5 years in which to establish themselves. So it can be done if it's done properly.

On an aside my brother lives off grid, though in Belize not here. He has a 4 bed 4 bath house electricity (solar), all the white goods and a large high def tv, hot and cold running water and even the internet.....he doesn't have air conditioning but has ceiling fans. His toilets flush just like ours....though into a septic tank.

prowla

And just to debunk the big brother state is picking on poor people thing, recall the case of the person who build a luxury mock castle behind bales of straw: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/surrey/8495412.stm

Derivative

prowla wrote: »

And just to debunk the big brother state is picking on poor people thing, recall the case of the person who build a luxury mock castle behind bales of straw: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/surrey/8495412.stm

Why is it relevant whether the owner is rich or poor?

We have a limited population and there are plenty of other controls in place to ensure that the entire countryside wouldn't become dotted with homes.

For one, a good amount of people couldn't afford to commute from their countryside escape to work and back. Many people simply wouldn't want to put the effort in. We wouldn't end up with every man, woman and child building a second home.

So what's the huge fuss? Really it seems like there are too many people around, if we actually have to worry about people buying up every bit of land to build on and convert acres of farmland into pointless personal play areas.

Errata

I think the bottom line is: young couple build joke house because they don't believe rules apply to them, but they most certainly will believe rules apply to everyone else.

ohit

What awesome initiative.

They could easily long it out of 1-2 years through the legal system before it gets forcefully demolished if they wanted to as well.

Good luck to them.

John_Pierpoint

ash28 wrote: »

On an aside my brother lives off grid, though in Belize not here. He has a 4 bed 4 bath house electricity (solar), all the white goods and a large high def tv, hot and cold running water and even the internet.....he doesn't have air conditioning but has ceiling fans. His toilets flush just like ours....though into a septic tank.

Belize has a population density 1/25 of the UK roughly speaking.
It has a population about a third that of Cyprus.
So we are talking about a UK town such as Southend on Sea.