Developer facing battle to build ‘Grand Designs’ home in Kent countryside

Developer’s battle to build ‘carbon-free’ Grand Designs-style home in Smarden, near Ashford, as parish council ‘strongly objects’.

Transcript

00:00The development plan is for a completely off-grid, brand-new development, all one level and it's

00:08off-grid with everything recycled, generated electricity, water processing and everything.

00:15There's nothing that's going to come from outside at all, so it's completely carbon-free.

00:20And yeah, it's something that is very exciting.

00:22We think it's unique in this country, certainly in the south-east of England, and really I

00:27hope that it's something that we can use as a bit of a blueprint in terms of that sort

00:31of development for other things we might want to do.

00:34But this is too good an opportunity to miss and we think this is a perfect site.

00:38The site originally, where we're standing and where this new development is going to

00:42be, is all part of what used to be called Church Farm, but it's a site which included

00:47industrial units.

00:50The industrial units we converted into eight residential units, which we're very proud

00:55of because we think they're very attractive and we hope that people are very happy.

00:59And the two-and-a-half acres that it wasn't built on, which is this, obviously, which

01:04is why we always wanted to do something like this on it, which is why we've come now.

01:08So we finished the development at the back with eight units, everybody's happy, we hope,

01:12but they're very nice units.

01:14And this is the site, or part of the site, that we now want to develop.

01:19The planning regulations and planning permissions, et cetera, take time.

01:25If we got permission later on this year, we would then have to go for the pre-start conditions.

01:32There'll be lots of those and they will take some time, so the program we have is to actually

01:37hopefully start building late spring next year.

01:40That's that program.