Clarkson’s Farm

[BikeBikeBIke]

Sway said:

BikeBikeBIke said:

Sway said:

Have a look at Daylesford Organic. Look at the road it's on, and the businesses surrounding it...

It's just down the road - but different planning authority.

The NPPF is exactly what it says. It's national.

...and the planning inspector is the final arbiter, not the local planning authority. So maybe nobody appealed in which case the people involved thought the decision was broadly 'correct'.

So there's no way different rules are being applied somewhere else. There's also no way the local planners can be making unreasonable decisions- they'd just get reversed on appeal.

(Sadly IMHO) the planners don't have much freedom to manoever. Which is a shame because if they did a lot less precious land would be under tarmac.

The bit you're missing is that every argument you have for why you support the planning decision for Clarkson is shown to be not as binary as you're stating through the existence of Daylesford.

Well maybe the planning inspector got it wrong. But you can't blame (or credit) any individual council because the Planning Inspector is the final arbiter and he isn't local.

Personally I would guess the Daylesford development is very different to Clarkeson's. (A shop and Restaurant that's going to be an Alton Towers level of draw for five or six years and then disappear when a TV show ends is pretty unique.)

EDIT: Of course,the other issue here is the refusal of planning is part of the plot that makes the show interesting. The last thing they want is to be allowed to do WTF they like. It would be like a war film with no Nazis.

Edited by BikeBikeBIke on Monday 6th May 13:50

[otolith]

Evanivitch said:

otolith said:

I think the idea is to diversify the farm, not to open a restaurant 20 miles away and pay rent somewhere nobody wants to drive into. “This was grown here” is a selling point. “This was grown on a farm 20 miles away” is just another restaurant in Oxford claiming to sell local-ish food.

Is Chipping Norton 20 miles away!?

Does he own land in Chipping Norton?

[BikeBikeBIke]

otolith said:

Evanivitch said:

otolith said:

I think the idea is to diversify the farm, not to open a restaurant 20 miles away and pay rent somewhere nobody wants to drive into. “This was grown here” is a selling point. “This was grown on a farm 20 miles away” is just another restaurant in Oxford claiming to sell local-ish food.

Is Chipping Norton 20 miles away!?

Does he own land in Chipping Norton?

I'm sure he could rent or buy a shop. Film shop scenes there and that's were people would want to go perhaps doing a drive by of the farm as the arrive/leave.

But wouldn't that deprive the show of a useful plot element?

[BikeBikeBIke]

It *was* appealed and the Council Planners were deemed right on the vast majority of the development:


https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23590368.jeremy-...

Again, requesting planning permission that they know doesn't meet the rules is part of the show. It's a source of jeopardy and conflict. The weather and the planners are the pantomime villains.

[otolith]

BikeBikeBIke said:

I'm sure he could rent or buy a shop. Film shop scenes there and that's were people would want to go perhaps doing a drive by of the farm as the arrive/leave.

But wouldn't that deprive the show of a useful plot element?

Maybe he could do a Clarkson’s Restaurant series where he sets up another business away from the farm, or perhaps a Clarkson’s Small Manufacturing Unit series where he starts making widgets on an industrial estate in Swindon?

[Evanivitch]

BikeBikeBIke said:

It *was* appealed and the Council Planners were deemed right on the vast majority of the development:


https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23590368.jeremy-...

Again, requesting planning permission that they know doesn't meet the rules is part of the show. It's a source of jeopardy and conflict. The weather and the planners are the pantomime villains.

Was 3 years car park all they asked for?

[pork911]

CLK-GTR said:

He's adding entertainment value to it but the bloody mindedness over the farm shop is just the sort of thing farmers face. A local farm here just closed theirs because they couldn't be arsed with all the regulations around installing disabled facilities.

Am I meant to sympathise with such farmers?

[BikeBikeBIke]

pork911 said:

Am I meant to sympathise with such farmers?

Yeah, on the one hand Clarkson's telling us the regulations are crippling,on other hand he also told us farming is 20 times more dangerous than all other industries combined amd the only reason he isn't selling us mineral water with st in it is that the regulations made him test it.

We all love complaining about the rules and authority amd it makes great television but we should just enjoy it and not come away thinking business should be a free for all.

[Greg_B]

The last few pages of this discussion are to my knowledge unique in a general discussion topic in having someone coming to the defence of the planning profession. Nobody likes planners in my experience. When you need them to deny something, they are usually invisible. When you need them to stay out of the way, they inject themselves into the situation to deny something for some arbitrary or innocuous reason.

[wombleh]

BikeBikeBIke said:

Terrific entertainment but I think the planners are spot on as do the locals.

Depends which locals you're talking about, the ones in Chadlington seem a bit mixed. Many seem to support what he's doing, it creates quite a lot of local interest and visitors to the area. I suspect some of the bad feeling may well be down to the mansion he built, which they avoid showing on the series !

Around wider WODC area then the planning department isn't hugely popular, allowing the estates going up without any infrastructure to support them, not got the best reputation with local builders/developers either.

[BikeBikeBIke]

wombleh said:

Around wider WODC area then the planning department isn't hugely popular, allowing the estates going up without any infrastructure to support them, not got the best reputation with local builders/developers either.

Yeah, the whole planning system in Britain is broken, there's housing going up everywhere. That's notnthe fault of planners though. They have near zero freedom to act.

[BikeBikeBIke]

Greg_B said:

Nobody likes planners in my experience. When you need them to deny something, they are usually invisible. When you need them to stay out of the way, they inject themselves into the situation to deny something for some arbitrary or innocuous reason.

In this case the planners deffo got it right in every sense beciase it was appealed so we know. I think the decision is right in every sense, but if you don't you can't blame the planners it's the NPPF or the planning inspector at fault.

[surveyor]

My own view is it is more about planning policy than anything else which is at odds with farmers need to diversify when state aid is reducing

[Downward]

BikeBikeBIke said:

Evanivitch said:

otolith said:

I think the idea is to diversify the farm, not to open a restaurant 20 miles away and pay rent somewhere nobody wants to drive into. “This was grown here” is a selling point. “This was grown on a farm 20 miles away” is just another restaurant in Oxford claiming to sell local-ish food.

Is Chipping Norton 20 miles away!?

You can walk it from the farm ,but I'm not sure even CN has the required parking.

It doesn't matter though. Maybe one third of the show is filmed around the farm shop plot. If the farmshop plot took place in Oxford people would choose to go to Oxford to buy their TShirts and maybe a small number of people would do a drive by of the farm. But a functioning shop selling Merch in Oxford would be crap TV whereas a battle against the nasty planners is great TV. (And it is!)

If this was really about a genuine farmer there would be no problem at all. The farmshop would sell produce to a few dozen people and nobody would mind the farmshop where it is.

The 2 I use sell the veggies in a shed and in the shop stuff like ice cream honey milkshakes. Space for about 3 cars too.

[BikeBikeBIke]

surveyor said:

My own view is it is more about planning policy than anything else which is at odds with farmers need to diversify when state aid is reducing

And no doubt the sort of development farmers want to do is exactly the sort of development we want to protect our landscape from. Most farmers could retire as millionaires if they sold their land for housing.

I can understand saying everyone should be able to do whatever they want on land they own. It's hard to fault that logic. But saying you *do* want a planning process but you don't want to protect rural areas with that planning process seems insane to me. What else is there to protect?

[CLK-GTR]

BikeBikeBIke said:

In that case why have planning laws? Just let everyone exploit their land in whatever way they want?

And if you think that's a bad idea then stopping massive media empires creating mass attractions in the rural Cotswolds is *exactly* the sort of thing they should be stopping.

But again, wouldn't it ruin the show? Let's say the rules allowed for the building of a suitable sized show and carpark packed full of.merch for the show and a restaurant with 500 covers and a decent tarmac access road and carpark for them. Would we watch that? The small restaurant and the farmshop that looks like a farm shop rather than a masssive merch shop is the whole point. And we'd lose the intereatig sub plots like doing stuff in a hurry and laying pipes at night.

And that's just one set of the reasons the show doesn't want permission do do all this stuff. The other is that Clarkson genuinely likes the farm and he's moved there because its rural. He wants to tarmac it over for industrial tourist retail even less than we do!

I just enjoy it. It's entertainment with a side of good farming knowledge. It's not all real.

Edited by BikeBikeBIke on Monday 6th May 13:22

Planning laws are indeed a mess but that's not the issue here so much as the uneven application of them by planning committees. This is not an issue unique to WODC nor should it come as a surprise to anybody involved in building anything beyond a small shed. However, here it looks to be very obvious as they have refused Clarkson things that they have allowed to others.

[unrepentant]

BikeBikeBIke said:

I can understand saying everyone should be able to do whatever they want on land they own. It's hard to fault that logic. But saying you *do* want a planning process but you don't want to protect rural areas with that planning process seems insane to me. What else is there to protect?

I can fault that logic! Planning permission exists to protect the population as a whole.

I lived in a N Yorkshire village that was essentially one street that was a dead end with farmland at the end of it. There was an old property right at the end with a large barn / outbuilding attached. The guy who owned it decided to let the outbuilding to a business that was collecting used clothing from all over the UK, sorting it in that building and then selling it to Eastern Europe.

The next thing we knew we have 40' artics, many on Eastern European plates, careering up through the village on a narrow road where children would often be playing. It transformed a tranquil village into something that nobody wanted.

We kicked up a big fuss with the council and it transpired there was no planning permission. So the business then applied retrospectively for permission. Fortunately we were able to unite the whole village behind our objection and the local district and county councillor was firmly behind us. Even so it took some time before we got a hearing and a rejection of the planning permission. In the meantime villagers got so frustrated that a number found creative ways to hinder the passage of the trucks.

I'm all for planning regs and for enforcement.

[BikeBikeBIke]

CLK-GTR said:

Planning laws are indeed a mess but that's not the issue here so much as the uneven application of them by planning committees. This is not an issue unique to WODC nor should it come as a surprise to anybody involved in building anything beyond a small shed. However, here it looks to be very obvious as they have refused Clarkson things that they have allowed to others.

Really? How many other massive footfall merch shops for global TV shows with stars with 7.5 million twitter followers have been given planing permission in rural areas of the Cotswolds?

[CrgT16]

He didn’t follow correct procedure as was not legal but your attitude and that of the villagers sounds very much like nimbyism.

[gregs656]

I'm not enjoying this season as much as the previous two.

Just feels more contrived and less about the farm.