Star comment: Barracks sale in flog it frenzy
We are in a Flog It! era.Councils are flogging off left, right, and centre. And so is the Ministry of Defence.
Move fast, because once they're gone, they're gone. Those living by these military bases can look forward to a whole load of new neighbours, and not in uniform this time. Yes, houses galore.
And if these sites are now surplus to requirements, why not? The principle of selling off military sites which are not required any more goes back a long way. Look what happened after the Great War, and the Second World War.
But there does need to be a check on the wholesale redevelopment as housing estates at these places, through the planning process. Parsons and Vennings Barracks would not win any beauty contest, but Tern Hill and Copthorne do have architectural merit and some historical interest. Sweeping them away and replacing them by a drab uniformity of modern suburbia would be progress on the one hand but an act of destruction on the other.
This frenzy of selling things off needs to be tempered by a bit of careful thought about what will work best, in planning terms, on these sites.
