Not happy :(

After living in our house for 22 years, enjoying the peace and quiet, we had a scrappy slip of paper shoved through our letter box last week telling us that the open land/woodland at the side and back of our house will be up for auction on the 29th April 2008, which I guess means the building of new houses. Gone are the peaceful summer days of sitting in the garden and the kids enjoying playing in the pool without the worry of anybody looking over the fence etc.. if I had a spare £10,000 I'd buy it myself

This is an (old) ariel picture of where we live, our house isn't that pink colour any more thank goodness, but you can see why we are so unhappy all the greenery will be gone

That's such a shame. Hopefully you'll be able to have a say if anyone does want to build, to make your privacy is ket as much as possible.

I have to say I live in a house built on a little bit of green like that.... and we bought our one as the other big one had a patch of land behind it and we did think one day that would be built on.

When we bought our house all those years ago, we were told that building would never happen on this piece of land, but I guess over the years things have changed......it's all about £££££'s

That must be a worry, make sure you oppose it at every hurdle, I'm sure your neighbours will support you. How about you all getting together to buy it as a community project? Get hold of the local papers, a local business man may buy it and give it back to the community, you never know!
Becky

I think you'd be talking more than £10K here????!!! We've got a very small piece of land behind our rear garden, which was originally half of our back garden, but when the house was sold to us they kept that small piece of land, and have since bought half of the neighbours, and consequently they had enough to build ONE small bungalow on it, and do you know how much that tiny piece of land with planning permission was sold for 6 months ago???? £100K so I think your £10K estimate is way, way low for more than one house!

Such a shame, all this green land going for building. Down here they're building in back gardens in our small village, even up the close behind me they've squeezed them in

Fight it anyway, but there's no way you could get that land for £10K absolutely no way! Even greenbelt land is astronimically priced now per square metre! I think you'll be quite shocked if you find out exactly HOW much it would be up for!

I was going to say that too. They are doing that everywhere, building in back gardens.
They do say that's one big reason for flooding, as I can vouch for. One of my oldies llives down a little track. He neighbour opposite sold his garden and a bungalow was built on it.
Now the track is a swamp when it rains as it no longer has lawn to soak into but falls onto athe bungalow and it's block paved drive.

Can't you and your neighbors petition against it Sharon? Maybe have a trip down to your local library and see if there's any ancient by-laws on that piece of land, you never know, they may still be in force

Tell me about it, the old lady next door has gone into a nursing home and the son wants to knock down her bungalow and build 5 houses on the plot. We have defeated 3 planning applications so far, but it's just a matter of time before he gets it right and it's approved. We will lose our seclusion and our views just to line his pockets.

The area of the land they plan to sell is 3/4 acre, starting price £10k but I know it will go for a lot more. We did ring the auction company and they said we would be kept in touch every step of the way on what the buyers intend doing with the land....but to us it's obvious, slowly every bit of greenery is disappearing and new houses appearing.

It's funny though, a few years back a lot of the trees had Dutch Elm disease, and were falling into our garden, we tried to find out who the land belonged to and nobody knew, but suddenly now it's up for sale they obviously know! When we find out we'll send them the bill for the cost of the dead trees we had to have chopped down and removed before they destroyed our property!!

We would also like to know how we stand with fencing on that side of our garden, at the moment, it's the trees and bushes (no fence needed) but once they start digging it all up our garden is going to be completely open to a building site.....

We have an appointment with our solicitors next week, we need to make sure we know where our boundaries are etc. on the deeds to our house/land.

with a starting price of £10k it won't have planning permission and quite likely no chance of getting it. I would be first in line tbh if it was next to me.