Jane Austen was a country girl, raised in a rural enclave of Hampshire, England, where the houses she lived in and the churches she frequented were surrounded by acres of undeveloped land. And for more than three years, the people who live in Austen country have been struggling to prevent builders from encroaching on the green spaces she knew.
It’s a classic NIMBY tale, with local officials responding to government mandates to provide more housing in the increasingly unaffordable UK market, while residents mobilize to oppose plans they fear would overburden infrastructure, degrade the environment and destroy their community's rural character.
A 2021 plan to build 1,200 houses on a property called Chawton Park Farm was finally abandoned a year ago, after a Change.org petition (5,600 signatures) and concerted local opposition. An apparently still-pending 2024 plan for at least 1,000 homes on another bucolic site, Neatham Down, got its own Change.org petition (1,780 signatures). As did the mere possibility that local planners might permit 1,000 homes to go up near Windmill Hill (3,200 signatures).
The latest salvo builds on the Windmill Hill opposition, with the by-now-obligatory Change.org petition (2,000+ signatures since late December) and a canny new focus: “Securing Jane Austen’s literary landscape for the Nation.” Spearheaded by a local politician and pegged to this year’s celebration of Austen’s 250th birthday, the new campaign has gotten some attention from the national press (for example, here and here), though it remains to be seen if the publicity will translate into traction.
As far as I can tell, no specific Windmill Hill development plan has been proposed as yet. But opponents are convinced that a push by the UK’s new Labour government to double local quotas for housing construction will inevitably endanger the green belt around the town of Alton and the nearby village of Chawton, where Austen spent her last eight years in a cottage that is now a museum of her life.
“Currently, Windmill Hill and fields is at risk from this government’s massive house-building targets for our area,” former Alton mayor Ginny Boxall, a county councillor from the opposing Liberal Democratic party, told the local newspaper last month. “In the same way as parts of Dorset have been conserved to form a legacy for Thomas Hardy, we are urging the UK government to recognize the importance of Alton and Chawton to Jane Austen’s legacy.”
Striking the appropriate balance between preservation and progress, between the duty to honor history (which history?) and the obligation to meet today’s needs: It’s a tricky business. Worth a novel of its own, maybe.
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