Welcome

Hello and welcome to my little blog. In this first post I'd like to describe what I plan to do with this small piece of the internet.

I live in a small town in the north-east of England called Shildon. I live on the very edge of the town and for the past thirty years the house has overlooked fields. It's not the best view in the world but it's attractive and we like it. The fields were bordered by a tall hedgerow filled with birds and other assorted wildlife.

Then a few years ago the world decided it was time to move on and a housing development company bought the fields with the plan to build houses there. Against a large number of objections (including my own) the local council approved planning permission and that was that.

Then nothing much happened. Occasionally men would be seen doing surveys of various kinds. Eventually two signs went up describing the project. One recently blew over in the wind and is still lying halfway across the field. A few days ago on the way home from work I saw that they'd removed the hedgerow completely. At this point I realised that things were probably about to happen and it was as good a time as ever to start this blog that I hope will be a pictorial time line of a housing project development and an interesting record of how things will change.

I'd just like to say at the beginning and for the record that I'm not opposed to housing developments like this generally. I fully appreciate the need for new housing. My objections for this development are many but sadly now in the past and not worth cluttering this blog with. The deed is done and we now have to live with the consequences (And there will be many). I just thought that maintaining a record of the development would be an interesting small project for me.

The next few posts will be a description of the area, a glimpse at how the area used to look and the small progress that has been made so far. The frequency of my posting will naturally increase as the development progress gets going.

I hope you'll all stay with me for the journey. Perhaps those eventually owners of the new houses might find the site and see what it was like "When all this was fields"