Nightingales may scupper plan for 5,000 new homes in Kent
Well at least they are more attractive than newts (depending on your individual point of view) and Shakespeare liked them “except I be by Sylvia in the night there is no music in the nightingale”. I am sure those Hinterland readers who are positive about rural development will find this story of the challenge the bird raises to the development of this particular corner of Kent amusing. There are serious questions to ask about our attitude to wildlife (if we can countenance the wholesale culling of badgers and deer) why the sentimentality about birds and newts? I know I am probably being a too provocative!!
Plans for one of Britain’s biggest housing developments, of 5,000 homes worth hundreds of millions of pounds, may have to be abandoned because of the presence of nightingales, the birds which sing in the night and have long been a favourite of poets.
The case, which centres on a disused army site in Kent, presents the conflict between the need to build new houses and people’s wish to preserve Britain’s threatened countryside and wildlife in its sharpest possible form. It is likely to lead to a bitter struggle.
The site at Lodge Hill, Chattenden, on the Hoo peninsula north of Chatham, has been earmarked by Medway District Council for what is in effect a new town, which besides its enormous housing quota is intended to provide 5,000 new jobs. The main developers are to be Land Securities, Britain’s biggest commercial property company.
Yet last year scientists discovered that Lodge Hill is probably the best site in the country for the nightingale, which is rapidly disappearing from Britain – its numbers have dropped by more than 90 per cent in the last 40 years