After a decade spent beating back noise pollution, link-roads and creeping urbanisation, Uttlesford’s latest district development plan, initiated in 1991, provides for 2,500 new homes to be built over and between them to accommodate airport staff of the future This means doubling their size. This, residents fear, will transform the area into yet another example of the sub-rural, semi-concrete sprawl spreading over England’s South-east. Theirs is the first High Court challenge to a district plan ever mounted by parish councils, and it is funded and co-ordinated entirely by residents.John Gibb, a former district officer in Nigeria, retired civil servant and resident of Birchanger for 35 years, is helping run the campaign. “The pressures on this area are already enormous – it’s almost like being under siege,” he says. Birchanger is also threatened by plans for a football stadium and waste-disposal site on its southern borders.”All this started with the airport,” says Gibb, who is also chairman of Birchanger parish council. “Most of us didn’t want the expansion because we guessed that once we had a large international airport, everything would follow – an endless flood of residential and industrial building.” Sure enough, immediately after the decision, speculative developers quietly scrambled for every square inch of land.

Five years later, when Takeley Parish began looking to buy some space for a village football pitch, they discovered with horror that the entire parish had been spoken for by developers – not a square yard remained. They eventually bought nine acres from a sympathetic farmer just outside their borders.Uttlesford’s 1991 plan reflects the district’s statutory obligation to Essex County Council to provide new dwellings for 2,500 airport workers who will apparently be needed when Stansted airport has grown to handle 15 million passengers a year (expansion has proved slow, with Stansted still at the four-million mark). Uttlesford’s first choice was Little Easton – a World War Two air base, and a single-site option strongly opposed by speculative developers. In 1993, a public inquiry also came out against the plan, suggesting that the houses be built over the four Domesday villages. This was approved by the Uttlesford council without further inspection.

Outraged that they had been given no chance to raise objections, the parishes consulted lawyers. They are now fighting Uttlesford for the right to a public inquiry.”It’s like a murder inquiry which cleared the main suspect, then swung round and hung four others instead, just because it needed to find someone guilty,” said Andrew Warren, member of Telsted parish council and chairman of the local conservation society. “These are Domesday villages and this is absolutely guaranteed to bring doom It’s the sheer quantity involved. The scale is wrong.” As the plan stands, 825 homes will be built beside Takeley’s existing 850, a further 400 will add to Birchanger’s 200 and 650 will link Little Dunmow (112) and Felsted (330).