Update on Fox Hill Plantation

 In December 2022 North Norfolk District Council refused permission for a ‘change of use of land to storage of caravans and boats, siting of 39 storage containers, siting of portable building for office use and erection of boundary fence’ at Fox Hill Plantation on the Morston road.

The applicant appealed the decision last October, a matter we covered then.

The Planning Inspectorate has just dismissed the appeal. An earlier application, in 2020, was also turned down by NNDC and it seems unlikely now that the scheme will ever go ahead.

(Meanwhile we have been monitoring the NNDC website for any news about Lanpro’s proposal for land west of North Street. Nothing has yet come up, and it has been about a year since residents were sent the circular describing the plans.) 

Update on Lanpro and Glavenhill

Lanpro’s proposal for the development of land west of North Street was circulated to local residents in early March. The document must have taken some time to prepare, perhaps a month or more, given the need to get the text approved by all the parties involved. Thus we may speculate that the landowner approached Lanpro, or was approached by them, no later than January, at which time the Bank of England base rate stood at 3.5%. Since then of course it has increased to 5.25%.

Despite optimistic noises being emitted by the UK press, there is no reason to believe that interest rates will go down in the near future. Indeed, we are as likely as not to find ourselves soon in a serious recession, if not an actual depression.

It is impossible to be sure of the size of the derivatives market, but it is far bigger now than it was just before the crash of 2008. If it implodes again – and the auguries suggest that it not only might, but eventually must – there is, this time, not enough capacity for governments to be able to bail out the culprits. There are simply too few productive taxpayers to mulct. The result will be widespread failure in the Western financial system, putting an end to speculative ventures such as building new housing estates.

Nor must we ignore geopolitical realities. The West is in long-term decline. The U.S. has not won a war since Desert Storm in 1991, and that was conducted using overwhelming firepower against a weak adversary. Its current proxy war in Ukraine, which, following decades of NATO expansion eastwards, it initiated in 2014 with the Maidan coup, is going so badly that our compliant media have all but ceased reporting it. The horrors unfolding in Gaza have caused an unprecedented unification of the Islamic world, to the extent that President Erdoğan – and Türkiye is a member of NATO – has been outspoken in his condemnation. Saudi Arabia is now accepting payment for oil in rubles: the petrodollar is on its last legs. Countries outside the West are de-dollarising. It is the USD as reserve currency that has been supporting the American empire and Western hegemony as a whole.

The sanctions against Russia have been an unmitigated disaster. The Russian economy is booming, while Europe is being so starved of cheap oil and gas that Germany is being forced to de-industrialise. Germany is, or was, the economic powerhouse of the EU. It does not take a genius to see what is going to happen to that institution now that Germany can no longer foot the bills. Despite Brexit, British and EU interests are still closely entwined, as indeed are British and American interests.

The illegal seizure of Russian sovereign and private assets by the U.S. and British governments has prompted other governments to start repatriating their own funds, since they no longer trust us. Indeed, the world, that is to say, 85% of its population, is realigning itself to the exclusion of the collective West. It is being led by the BRICS countries – particularly China and Russia, a process now being accelerated by events in the Middle East.

One could go on, for there is much more in this vein, but you can see that the future of the British economy does not look good. Then we have the almost certain probability of an incoming Labour government, which is unlikely to be sympathetic to property developers. Mr Sunak may delay the election till the autumn of next year, but as far as we are aware Glavenhill have not yet even submitted a pre-planning application. A full planning application for such a sensitive site will take many months of negotiation and to-and-fro before it can even be considered by the councillors on the NNDC Planning Committee.

As developers go, Glavenhill is a minnow. It has a total of three employees and a single director. To quote its own reporting to the government:

The company operates on a portfolio basis for land promotional activities and some of the projects complete whilst others do not. Costs incurred with the projects that do not obtain planning permission and do not complete are written off once planning has been rejected. The company’s shareholders, directors and other investors support the company until funds from successful completed transactions are repatriated to the company.

Its modus operandi, then, is to fly kites and see which of them find a favourable wind. The outlay so far has apparently been limited to the proposal document and the presentation in the Village Hall that followed it.

A 2019 pre-planning application for the same site was vehemently rejected by the NNDC, and that was for fewer dwellings than Lanpro propose. It is quite possible that this is one kite that Glavenhill will not even attempt to launch, given the economic forecast and the expense of a full planning application.

This blog was started, and the Langham Action Committee convened, in response to what looked at the time like an urgent need to counter Lanpro’s proposal. That need has become less urgent. The feature articles were introduced to keep the blog current in people’s mind, but it would seem that the time-consuming work of compiling them is no longer necessary, and from now on such posts as appear will mostly relate to planning matters.

Of course there is no guarantee that Lanpro and Glavenhill have given up, despite all indications to the contrary. If they do submit an application, we shall have only 21 days in which to respond, so if you have not already done so we urge you to subscribe by email, using the gadget in the sidebar. 

Thank you for your attention so far, and if anything transpires we will try to get the news to you as quickly as possible.

The beet campaign

Sugar beet is one of the most important local cash crops, thriving as it does in a temperate climate and on sandy loams, and the ‘campaign’ – that is, the business of harvesting and then transporting the beets to the processing plant – is starting in earnest about now. It will last for roughly five months.

The humble beet is at the centre of a large and hi-tech industry. Langham’s crop is processed at British Sugar’s Wissington Beet Factory, south of King’s Lynn; British Sugar is the sole processor of the British beet harvest, every year turning about 8 million tonnes of sugar beet into 1.2 million tonnes of sugar.

 

The sugar is sucrose, chemically identical to that derived from sugar cane. Depending on the variety and growing conditions, the ‘pol’, or sugar content of a beet, varies between 12% and 21%. Water accounts for about three-quarters of the gross weight. What is left over is a pulp used for animal feed and to make fertilisers, the latter marketed by British Sugar as TOPSOIL and LimeX. Non-sugar content is also burned by them to provide enough electricity to heat 120,000 homes. And a new plant at Wissington, the first in the UK, also produces bioethanol.

The sugar beet is a cultivar of the common beet, Beta vulgaris L., whose potential as a source of sugar attracted the attention of plant-breeders in the eighteenth century. Since then its sugar content has been steadily increased. Other beet cultivars are chard, beetroot and mangelwurzel, but the sugar beet is the most economically important: the world harvested 253 million tonnes in 2020. The largest producer was Russia, with a harvest of 34 million tonnes. Whether we are doing ourselves a favour by producing all this sucrose is another matter.

Deep ploughing is used to prepare for spring sowing. Sugar beet is a demanding crop and rotation is essential. It may be grown in the same field once every three years, the interim crops being peas, beans or cereals. At one time beets were dug by hand, a backbreaking job. Then mechanisation began, crudely at first:

   

and now with almost incredible sophistication:

The average yield is about 60 tonnes per hectare. Following a poor 2022/3 season, caused by the weather, British Sugar are paying £40 a tonne on 2023/4 contracts, a year-on-year increase of 48%.

Wissington has a large but finite storage capacity and the flow of beets to it must be carefully regulated; the plant operates 24 hours a day during the campaign. The beets may either be taken directly to Wissington or stored in piles called ‘clamps’, typically by the side of a road. Clamped beets are transferred to lorries by means of conveyors. You may have seen this in action: Sands of Hindringham are a prominent local beet-haulier.

It may be irksome to be stuck behind a beet lorry, or to have one’s car dirtied by the mud that inevitably gets on the lanes during the campaign, but even if you don’t concede that sugar beet is all but vital to the local farming community, you surely are not averse to the biscuits or slice of cake that may await you when you finally make it home for tea.

The folks who lived on the hill

Langham sits on the westernmost edge of the Cromer Ridge, which is about 5 km wide and 30 km long, stretching all the way to Mundesley. The Ridge comprises sands, gravels and clays deposited at the edge of successive ice sheets in the Anglian glaciation some 430,000 years ago.

At its heart are moraines – a moraine is defined as ‘a mass of rocks and sediment carried down and deposited by a glacier, typically as ridges at its edges or extremity’. Ice sheets as much as a kilometre thick, some stretching all the way to modern-day Scandinavia, are believed to have ended here more than once, leaving a succession of glacial tills so complex that geologists are still trying to understand them.

The surface of the Ridge is covered with sands and gravels, in some places up to 40 m thick. These are believed to have been deposited by meltwater from the front of the last Anglian ice-sheet. It is almost impossible to imagine the scale and power of the melt from such a huge glacier, or indeed the devastation it left behind: a blank slate, ready to be colonised by living things.

Lichens would have been the first, followed by mosses and fungi, their decaying remains forming a thin soil for low-growing plants. These in turn would attract insects and other animals whose corpses would further fertilise the ground, leading eventually to the sort of ecosystem found here in the Paleolithic: largely forested with, however, tracts of more open country, kept that way by the browsing of herbivores such as the aurochs.

The free-draining strata of the Ridge gave rise to acidic soils and heathy landscapes. Such plants as gorse, heather and pine do well here, and scattered clumps of Scots Pine are a distinctive feature of the local landscape. The heaths at Salthouse and Kelling give some hint of what it may generally have been like on the Ridge during the Stone Age.

Salthouse Heath

Image credit: Evelyn Simak; licence

However, west of the River Glaven the hills are lower and the soils rather more alkaline, since the glacial outwash cut deeper here into the underlying chalk. Especially where they have been enriched by eons of plant growth and decay, neutral soils make for highly productive farming.

Here is a 4.35 km cross-section taken along grid north through Morston and Langham Hall and into the valley of our little tributary of the River Stiffkey. (NB the profile is compressed horizontally, making the hills look much steeper than they are.) Langham Hall is at an elevation of 40 metres and Morston is at sea-level.

The late Mesolithic inhabitants of England were primarily hunter gatherers, probably partly nomadic, but they also practised a form of proto-agriculture, including game management, the propagation and protection of food-bearing plants such as berry-bearing bushes, and a degree of domestication of animals. Wolves of course had already been domesticated as dogs for thousands of years and used in hunting.

One of the strategies used in hunting was to lay an arc of fire upwind, driving the animals and birds towards men waiting downwind. This use of fire had a devastating local effect on the tree-cover, but it was mainly temporary, for the native population was small, and the country remained largely forested.

The Mesolithic natives were supplanted by, or interbred with, stocky Germanic incomers who brought with them a technology that had slowly spread from the Euphrates: organised agriculture. They cleared the land using a technique called ‘slash-and-burn’. Trees were either ring-barked and left to die or cut down with flint-bladed axes. The dead or fallen timber, together with undergrowth such as bracken and holly, was torched during periods of drought.

Initially the minerals in the ashes and the innate richness of the soil provided a decent return on these early farmers’ labours. But they knew little or nothing about fertilisers. After a few seasons the productivity of a field would decline to the point where it wasn’t worth cultivating, and more woodland would have to be burnt.

Thus we can speculate that most of the forest hereabouts would have been permanently destroyed quite early in the Neolithic, at least 5,000 years ago.

The land here would have been highly sought after. It has fertile soil and a salubrious, elevated position – but also access to running fresh water. The Domesday Book records that Langham had a mill, suggesting that what is now a brook may in the recent geological past have been something more. As a bonus, the coast with its seafood lies only a couple of miles away.

These Germanic people, then, were the likely founders of the village of Langham. Their houses were made of wood and stone, caulked with clay and having a conical roof covered in turf, and were clustered together for mutual protection from bears and wolves. Such a village was also likely to have had a meeting house where the elders gathered (plus ça change) to decide on policy.

We might even suppose that the headman’s house occupied the very site of Langham Hall, just about the most favoured and elevated spot for miles around. Whether he would have had a view of Blakeney Point from his doorway is another question, since the shingle spit at that time is likely to have been rudimentary or even non-existent – but that’s a different story altogether.

The razing of Fox Hill Plantation

You may already know that another planning application was submitted for Fox Hill Plantation on the Morston Road.

The history of planning applications for this site may be viewed here. The latest application, having been rejected by NNDC, has gone to appeal.

The proposal would see the copse turned into a site for 39 storage containers, with additional storage for caravans and boats, as well as a facility for portable buildings for office use, together with the erection of a boundary fence. It was rejected some time ago. The site is in the North Norfolk Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and would be served by an unclassified road close to a primary school. The change of use would increase the level of traffic – particularly of goods vehicles, some of them heavy – between Morston and the church crossroads, adding to the problems in North Street.

Such a development is unlikely to provide much in the way of job creation; the coast is at capacity for boats already. The potential harms outweigh whatever benefits a development like this would bring to the area.

North Norfolk has some of the darkest night skies in the country. A storage compound of the sort proposed would undoubtedly have security lights. These would affect the whole area between Langham and Morston. And because the site is situated on a hillside, there is also the possibility of polluted runoff affecting adjoining fields.

If you wish to make any comments online please quote the appeal reference

APP/Y2620/W/23/3319567

and go to the Planning Inspectorate’s website. Letters should be addressed to

Safia Kaiser
The Planning Inspectorate
Temple Quay House
2 The Square
Bristol
BS1 6PN

The deadline for comments is 6 November 2023, so please act as soon as you can.

The more opposition we can raise, the better the chances of scotching this scheme once and for all, so please also consider copying your comments to NNDC. Emails should be sent to planning@north-norfolk.gov.uk and letters to

The Chief Planning Officer
North Norfolk District Council
Council Offices
Holt Road
Cromer
Norfolk
NR27 9EN

The Burne-Jones window

Image credit: Evelyn Simak; licence

One of the notable features in the church of St Andrew and St Mary is a stained glass window in the north wall, ‘Faith and Hope’, installed by Morris & Co. in 1894 and designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. You can view it in context here.

Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphen came later) was born in Birmingham in 1833. At the age of 11 he began attending the local King Edward VI Grammar School; at 15 he transferred to Birmingham School of Art before, aged 19, going up to Exeter College to read theology. At Oxford he became acquainted with William Morris; together with some of Jones’s friends from Birmingham, they formed a society they called The Brotherhood. They read the works of Ruskin and Tennyson, visited churches and idealised the aesthetic of the medieval period, which became central to Burne-Jones’s style. Later, influenced further by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites, he developed his own, unique, artistic voice. Indeed, it was Rossetti who encouraged him to abandon the ministry for the life of an artist.

In May 1877, at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, he exhibited three major pictures, the Days of Creation, the Mirror of Venus, and the Beguiling of Merlin: from then on his reputation was assured.

The Beguiling of Merlin

Birmingham in the nineteenth century might be said to be the very crucible of British manufacturing, with a special emphasis on high-value engineering. The Brotherhood and Burne-Jones’s style can be seen as a rejection of that. His association with Morris lasted till the latter’s death in 1896 (Burne-Jones himself died in 1898).

Burne-Jones (L) and William Morris, from a photograph by Frederick Hollyer  

Morris & Co. produced hand-crafted work such as wood-carving, stained glass, metalwork, tapestry, printed fabrics and carpets, and Burne-Jones’s designs feature in many of these. His stained glass windows are to be found all over the country. One of the best known is ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford:

The three theological virtues are also depicted at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel,

Image © cambridge2000.com

while Humility is added at St Margaret’s Church in Hopton. Note that the cartoons used there are the same as those at Christ Church Cathedral:

Image credit: Evelyn Simak; licence

Of the theological virtues, St Paul averred that ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’. (King James Bible, 1 Corinthians, 13:13.) In later English versions of that verse, the word is translated as ‘love’. The Latin word is caritas, which has the sense of the Greek ἀγάπη (agapē), denoting brotherly as opposed to sexual or parental love. C S Lewis uses the term to denote the highest variety of love known to humanity: a selfless love that is passionately committed to the well-being of others. It is an acceptance that in each of us is reflected the divine.

An earlier (1860s) window very similar to Langham’s is in All Saints, Sculthorpe. Yet another local Burne-Jones window is in St Peter and St Paul at Cromer.

A stained glass window is an engineering as well as an artistic feat. Various metals or metal oxides must be added in precise quantities to the glass in its molten state to achieve the required tints; alternatively the glass may be enamelled with pigments fused into it in kilns. Strips of lead hold each piece of glass in place, and every joint must be weatherproof. The whole structure must be robust enough to support its own considerable weight and to withstand high winds – and of course it has to fit the window-aperture exactly.

Paradoxically, in many of its enterprises, Morris & Co. depended on the sort of skills which had made Birmingham so prosperous. It was also an example of the astonishing energy and prowess of the Victorians in almost everything they undertook.

The company’s aesthetic continues to influence British design, and in fact is undergoing a resurgence. More and more people, like The Brotherhood before them, are turning away from modernity and yearning for a simpler and more human way of life. In some measure we already have that in Langham. Our Burne-Jones window gives us Faith and Hope, the essential precursors of Charity, which here is not in short supply, despite the lack of a window dedicated to it.

Second homes

Blakeney residents have just voted overwhelmingly (89.8%) for a new neighbourhood plan intended to restrict ownership of second homes. Apparently 44% of the 706 properties in the village are second homes or holiday lets.

Similar rumblings are to be heard in other resorts round the country – and these places by and large are resorts, with a local economy that would be moribund were it not for the influx of money from tourism.

Should there be restrictions on second-home ownership? That is a vexed question and one which sooner or later will be aired in Langham. It raises other questions about the infrastructure of modern Britain and the sort of society ours has become.

Why would someone want a second home? The obvious reason is that the second home is in a more attractive place than the principal home. A hope of capital appreciation may also be involved, given the headline level of inflation and the generally dismal performance of investments elsewhere in the economy, though of course capital gains tax is charged on the sale of second homes.

The principal home is likely to be in a town or city where money can be made, particularly London. The environmental degradation of British towns and cities has been accelerating for the past hundred years at least, the chief reason, latterly, being overcrowding caused by mass immigration. In our piece about house prices in Langham, we mentioned demographic change as one of the key drivers of house-price inflation, and this subsumes the phenomenon of second-home ownership.

As soon as they can – typically when they retire – a hefty proportion of urbanites sell up and move to some more congenial spot. They can hardly be blamed for this: during their working lives urban dwellers contribute the bulk of taxes paid in Britain, taxes which are used to subsidise services for country dwellers. It would be monstrous to pass legislation forcing people who have lived and worked in a degraded urban environment to grow old and die in it.

A second-home owner is in effect a part-time retiree. He escapes from the city whenever he can, to breathe clean air and live for a few days or weeks in a place devoid of ULEZ cameras and the roar of traffic. He may plan to retire to his second home when he gets the chance.

A hundred and fifty years ago the bulk of the working population in Langham was employed on the land. Now all but a tiny minority of farm workers have been replaced with machines. After the Industrial Revolution, redundant farm labourers migrated to the cities and jobs in the new factories. The cottages they had occupied fell vacant, to be gradually taken up by such people as artists (who can live more or less anywhere), retirees and, yes, second-home owners escaping from the environs of those ‘dark Satanic mills’.

The demand, particularly from retirees, was such that in the 1970s the south-eastern corner of Langham was developed (The Cornfield and adjoining properties), followed closely by the St Mary’s estate in the north-western. These houses were not built in response to a boom in the local economy, however many of them might be occupied today by people who work here.

Let us assume that second-home ownership in Langham is capable of being banned or otherwise penalised (it isn’t, as we shall see presently). The idea is to reduce local house-prices so that young people who wish to live here may do so, a laudable enough aspiration which, however, raises a hornets’ nest of political issues.

In the first place, what right do others have to tell someone how he may spend his money – money that has probably been worked very hard for and taxed over and over again? Especially when those others already enjoy the privilege of living in the pleasant surroundings where the would-be second-homer wants to buy.

Well, the government forbids us to spend our money on handguns or hard drugs because these things are judged harmful. It is harmful to compel young people to live far away from their families. But then why should impecunious people be entitled to a luxury denied to those who can afford to pay for it? Here we are skirting close to the sort of legislation brought in by the Bolsheviks, who, if they deemed it overlarge, made you share your house or flat with strangers.

Britain is a socialist country: today’s ‘conservative’ government is far further to the left than Harold Wilson’s in 1964. It may indeed come about that it mandates who may or may not live in a particular house, but we have not got there yet. Legislation restricting second-home ownership, however, might help pave the way to it. We should be careful what we wish for.

A second-home owner is wealthier than the average citizen. He can afford not only the price of the property but the costs of maintaining it and of getting there and back. Envy surely plays a part in the resentment behind these calls to action. The resentment is compounded by the fact that the second-homer often brings with him a car-load of groceries and takes his laundry back to the city to get it cleaned.

Which brings us to the impact of second homes and holiday lets on the local economy. If all these properties were occupied by local people, where would they work? Would they not have to commute to Fakenham or even further afield? Without the effects of tourism, about a fifth of the jobs in north Norfolk would go. And if these local people could not commute, or were otherwise unable to work, how could they afford to pay the level of council tax now imposed? They couldn’t. NNDC would likely go into deficit and services would be cut. And if these people couldn’t find work, they would be on benefits, leading perhaps to the downward spiral of lifelong dependence on the state.

We mustn’t forget that tourism brings a great deal of money into north Norfolk, over half a billion in 2019. A fair amount of this is spent in one way or another by second-homers. As a result we have a plethora of nice pubs, cafés and restaurants to visit year-round, as well as such facilities as the Cley Marshes Visitor Centre and the extraordinary provision of shops in Holt. We also have an array of local tradesmen to choose from.

As to the efforts of such parish councils as those at Blakeney or Burnham Market to restrict second-home ownership, we mustn’t be too hard on their naivety. They are doomed for the simple reason that it is up to the owner of two properties to declare which is his primary and which his secondary residence. If council tax on second homes is charged at the standard rate in the city, and at double or even triple the rate in Burnham Market, which property do you think will be declared as which? As the Right Honourable Ed Balls and his wife, the equally honourable Yvette Cooper, taught us in their ‘house-flipping’ episode, re-designation of one’s primary residence is easy.

The only answer to such problems as are caused by second-home ownership is to make the principal place of residence so attractive that nobody wants a second home. That is plainly not going to happen.

As with everything, there are pros and cons. Pro: year-round residents enjoy better facilities (and incidentally inflated house-prices); con: local workers, especially the young, are unable to live where they choose. That may be hard, but then so is life.