Latest news with #MalvernHills
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Unsustainable' housing schemes for village rejected
TWO housing schemes for Lower Broadheath have been rejected. Plans had been put forward to build nine homes off Frenchlands Lane and seven homes in Peachley Lane. But both proposals have been turned down by Malvern Hills District Council. Planners said the Frenchlands Lane scheme would cause 'harm' to the setting of nearby Christ Church - a landmark in the village. Lower Broadheath Parish Council said the homes would represent 'over development' of the site and are 'not required to satisfy local housing need'. 'The development is unsustainable, with access from a single-track road with no footway or passing places,' parish councillors said. 'Because of its location in open countryside and the need to remove established hedges it is considered that the proposals would have a detrimental impact on the biodiversity of the site.' Neighbours said the area was already busy and adding more homes - and therefore cars - would be dangerous for children. The Peachley Lane plans were turned down by the district council's northern area planning committee, despite being recommended for approval by officers. The proposal had attracted more than 40 objections from villagers, who had raised concerns Lower Broadheath was being turned into a small town. Read more DOGE asked to pay for food laid on during council visit Is Worcestershire's environment chief a climate change denier? 500 people sign petition calling for changes to junction Clare Jennings said: 'The proposed development threatens the rural character of Lower Broadheath, encroaching upon green spaces and agricultural land. The loss of these areas not only diminishes the village's aesthetic appeal but also impacts local biodiversity and contributes to environmental degradation.' She also said there were 'serious safety concerns' about the site being accessed from Peachley Lane and the potential for increased crime. Heather Dudfield said: 'Our village has recently had a large development on it and further development will take away from the village feeling and make it a suburb of Worcester, rather than village. 'It is very disappointing to see new build houses being hastily constructed on precious green land, rather than developing disused sites around the county.'
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New housing development in Leigh Sinton taking shape
A new housing development is taking shape. The 52-home project is being built in Leigh Sinton, and was visited recently by Councillor John Gallagher, leader of Malvern Hills District Council. Named The Hamlet, the development is located off the A4103 and will offer a mix of two, three, four, and five-bedroom homes in detached, semi-detached, and terraced designs. Cllr Gallagher said: "It was a pleasure to visit this important development and see first-hand the work that is going into delivering these much-needed homes. "It's always great to see developments that are meeting the housing needs across the Malvern Hills district and are being delivered by a local homebuilder. "I look forward to seeing the development blossom into a great place to live and somewhere the Malvern Hills residents can thrive." He was welcomed to the site by Colin Cole, CEO of Lioncourt Homes, along with site manager Ben Hingley and health, safety, and environment manager Rob Brown. The development includes 15 affordable homes, available through social rent and shared ownership schemes, with the remaining properties for sale on the open market. More than £350,000 in Section 106 contributions will be invested in the community, supporting education, transport, public spaces, children's play areas, healthcare, and green infrastructure such as parks and allotments. Mr Cole said: "We were delighted to welcome Cllr Gallagher to The Hamlet to showcase the progress being made in delivering these significant homes for Leigh Sinton. "As a five-star homebuilder and a Worcester-based company, we are proud to be meeting the growing demand for homes of all tenures while supporting the economy through investment and employment. "We are committed to delivering developments that provide much-needed housing but also blend seamlessly into their charming locations." Lioncourt Homes recently received a five-star customer satisfaction rating from the Home Builders' Federation (HBF) for the 11th consecutive year. The company currently has homes available at The Green in Rushwick and Martley Fields in Martley, with The Hamlet expected to be completed in 2027.
BBC News
15-07-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Worcestershire's Malvern Hills Trust should be abolished, says councillor
Calls to abolish a trust that protects and manages the Malvern Hills, and replace it with a national park, have come from a Worcestershire councillor Richard Udall said the Malvern Hills Bill, which proposes changes to the way the trust is governed, is not fit for was speaking as Worcestershire County Council voted to oppose the bill in its current Councillor Adrian Hardman told the full council: "The Malvern Hills Trust is outdated, misplaced and irrelevant to the real needs of Malvern Hills. It needs to go." But trust chief executive Deborah Fox said the organisation wanted to modernise its governance. Trust 'outdated' The council has concerns over a number of extended powers proposed in the bill, including the installation of cattlegrids and closure of Councillor Adrian Hardman told the full council: "The [trust] board in its current form does need some reform and I'm keen the council doesn't stand in its way."But he added: "If you're putting in cattlegrids then you'll need fences – and that goes against the aims of the original bill."Udall said: "The bill is not supported by local residents."We should be petitioning the government for the abolition of the Malvern Hills Trust and its replacement with a new national park, which would be directly elected, accountable and therefore much more transparent.' Ms Fox said: "The Malvern Hills Trust is here to care for the hills and commons. The trust is trying to update and modernise its governance."The trust was established by an Act of Parliament and any major changes in our governance require a new act."She said she welcomed anyone with questions to attend one of the drop-in events in July and Fox added: "We want to give people an opportunity to have their questions answered and learn more about how the bill will allow us to operate more effectively." This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, which covers councils and other public service organisations. Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Telegraph
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The ‘diabolical' BBC drama that inspired 28 Years Later
Landing in the BBC One schedules one Thursday evening in March 1974, Penda's Fen sat oddly. For those viewers who had earlier watched Tony Blackburn host Top of the Pops, or caught up with Are You Being Served? here was a completely different beast. It was peculiar – even by the standards of the channel's prestigious Play for Today slot, within which it sat. After all, the film set up a battle between the forces of Light and Dark, individualism and conservatism, on the Malvern Hills – all played out through the eyes of a priggish adolescent. Few who saw it would have gone to bed without its succession of extraordinary, terrifying visions haunting their dreams – visions which, if director Danny Boyle is to be believed, 'left an extraordinary impression on me'. At the age of seventeen much of it went over his head but he knew that night it was an 'incredible film' and when he eventually moved into television in the late Eighties, its director Alan Clarke was the first person he contacted. Small wonder, too, that Boyle's latest film, 28 Years Later, a zombie horror set in Northumberland, feels like a direct successor to the eerie rural imagery of Penda's Fen. The film is the story of a vicar's son, Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), a hidebound teenager whose comfortable, complacent assumptions about his world crumble one by one. He is visited by demons and angels, meets the ghost of his idol Edward Elgar, sees a church aisle splitting to reveal a giant bottomless chasm, is spoken to by Jesus on the cross, and witnesses the arrival of the seventh-century King Penda – the last pagan king of Mercia. Like a modern-day Piers Plowman, each visitor tells Franklin a truth that he must assimilate – and which shakes his conservative, little-Englander views. The film's cry of individualism and the radical spirit has reverberated for over 50 years. Long before 'Rooster' Byron, the whirling, maverick force at the heart of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Penda Fen's found uncanny, romantic resistance in the depths of the British countryside. This 'film for television' was created by playwright David Rudkin, who had built his reputation with Afore Night Come for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. This set out his stall as a writer of dark power and originality, depicting fruit-pickers at an orchard descending into savagery after a helicopter sprays them with pesticide. Rudkin himself resisted any connection to the then-burgeoning genre of 'folk horror'. But today it's hard not to view Rudkin's obsession with England's deep past, elemental forces, and his environmental fears as being in the same lineage as The Wicker Man (1973), John Bowen's 1970 film Robin Redbreast (known as 'Britain's Rosemary's Baby') and the occult fiction of Dennis Wheatley. It was the mood of the times. A queasy pastoralism – which looks ever more prescient in our era of climate fears – haunts Penda's Fen. Yet it is more than that: throughout the film, there's a constant sense that some religious, mystical force is about to erupt from the pregnant landscape. The true miracle is that it was ever broadcast at all. By 1971, Rudkin was struggling to get his increasingly difficult work staged; he also felt abandoned by television. That summer, though, producer David Rose came calling. He had enjoyed success with the launch of the police drama Z-Cars in the 1960s and had recently moved to the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. He wanted to put on new stories and Rudkin was high on his list. Penda's Fen was commissioned a year later. Rose, who went on to set up Film on Four, always regarded it as his proudest achievement. 'It's an extraordinary piece of work,' he told me. 'My mother never spoke to me about my programmes, but she was haunted for nights by Penda's Fen.' Spencer Banks – who played the film's adolescent hero – was familiar to many viewers from the hugely successful children's sci-fi series Timeslip. But his step into peak-time 'serious' drama was challenging. When Banks first went up for the part of Stephen, he never saw a script during auditions. He remembers his father sat at the kitchen table, checking over the contract. 'Oh, here's a clause you don't see very often,' he said. 'The actor agrees to be set on fire.' It was daunting for an 18-year-old to communicate this otherworldly journey into adulthood and – as Dennis Potter put it in his review for the New Statesman – 'the images of light and darkness warring in the young man's mind'. In early rehearsals, Banks recalls he was 'confused and a little lost,' but in the end, 'I quite simply put all my faith in the director, Alan Clarke. Which I think is the reason we got the result that we did.' In commissioning the drama, Rose put together a writer and director who were chalk and cheese. Alan Clarke cut his teeth at ITV but was now firmly part of the BBC drama department. Today, his reputation is built on the violent and gritty Scum and Made in Britain – which, in their concern with broken, brutish young men, prefigure shows like Adolescence. But Clarke's early work tended to be naturalistic, contemporary and not as focused on vicious young men. Such a down-to-earth style was at odds with Rudkin's poeticism. At their first meeting, Rudkin was told by the director that this was 'a heavy number. How many books do I have to read to understand this?' 'Just the one,' replied Rudkin, pointing to the script in his hand. In the end, their two visions gelled. The film's fantastic imaginings have their power because they are presented as real, almost ordinary, which makes them all the more disturbing. Achieving this pulsing otherness was the next challenge. The shoot – much of it done outdoors – was an enormous operation, and the weather was a constant challenge. Actor Ian Hogg, who played local firebrand playwright Arne – the man who sparks Stephen's turn towards pastoral deep England – remembers how 'it rained when it shouldn't almost always'. The director began to take it personally. One sodden day, he asked his production manager, 'If I strip to the waist and thrash about in the mud, do you think [God] will forgive me and send some sunshine?' The crew's base camp was Chaceley, a village near Tewkesbury whose population even today is just a little over a hundred. The rectory, which doubled as Stephen's childhood home, was the location for a number of scenes, including the visit of a demon. As Stephen tosses and turns in the throes of an erotic dream about a fellow schoolboy, a terrifying, gargoyle-like incubus kneels on top of Stephen as he sleeps. In another scene straight from William Blake, an angel appears to Stephen on a riverbank. Make-up designer Jan Nethercot recalls having to create a convincing heavenly visitation. Painting the actor gold, there was a worry he would asphyxiate if they failed to leave a small part of the skin uncovered. 'We'd seen Goldfinger,' she recalls. The marshland that day was misty. Jan's assistant, Penny Gough, remembers how the light caused a radiance on the paint: 'The gold from his wingtips went right up into the mist and it was spectacular.' A further unforgettable image is of a man in a dinner jacket and bow-tie, standing by a tree stump on a garden lawn, as he uses a meat cleaver to cut off the hands of children in front of their devout parents. It's a queer, disturbing comment on subjugation – and vividly traumatising. The scene is presented as some ghastly, jubilant ritual, the victims rejoicing in their missing limbs. Filming the scene, Clarke's main worry was whether the BBC would allow a crew to put any child in this situation. Costume designer Joyce Hawkins promptly volunteered her daughter, who is herself now a television producer. 'It's a wonder I wasn't personally traumatised,' says Caroline Hawkins. 'Or maybe I was, who knows?' Almost five million people watched Penda's Fen on its first transmission. Callers to the duty log described it as 'horrific' and 'approaching black magic'. One said it was 'diabolical' and promised they 'will be writing to someone very important', but hadn't decided who it would be. Those making it knew that the film was special – but none would have expected it to become as deeply embedded in the public consciousness. What brought it back from obscurity was a repeat on Channel 4 in 1990, just two days before the director Clarke's death. A new generation taped it and, slowly, Penda's Fen entered the canon, leading to books, music, cinema screenings and even academic conferences. The film also left its mark on English filmmakers like Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) and Ben Wheatley (A Field in England). And, of course, Danny Boyle. At the time, though, the film was too singular to get a common reaction. Like a message in a bottle, it went out into the world and, as with the most lasting works of art, connected to the present moment. It touches on education, defence, the environment, paganism and English traditions – but also has characters who are non-binary. (Indeed, the film's climax sees Stephen proclaim to the Wiltshire downs: 'My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man… I am mud and flame!') Speaking last year, Rudkin recalled a postbag filled with correspondents who said they had 'some inner place it reached that nothing else had.' More than 50 years on, Penda's Fen continues to find viewers' souls – and shake them. Penda's Fen: Scene by Scene by Ian Greaves is published by Ten Acre Films on June 23. Spencer Banks will appear at a screening hosted by the Barbican Centre in London on September 6. The film is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI.
BBC News
20-06-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Malvern Hills announces new round of rural project funding
Rural businesses are being given the chance to apply for up to £25,000 of funding to support new of interest from eligible groups are now being invited for round two of the Malvern Hills Rural Hills District Council (MHDC) said successful applicants may only spend the money on physical projects, such as new equipment or machinery, and not for staff or day-to-day running Beverley Nielsen said the funding provided "a great opportunity for new businesses or existing ones to access support to grow and develop". Small business, charities, and further education institutions in the Malvern Hills area are among the organisations eligible to apply for grants of between £2,500 and £25,000, funded by MHDC and the government's Rural England Prosperity winners include a facilities management company in Hanley Swan which was awarded more than £7,500 to renovate its office, and a husband-and-wife team who turned their front room in Upton-upon-Severn into a is the second round of funding this year, with the first having closed to applications on deadline for expressions of interest is 7 July, while full applications must be submitted by 18 on both rounds will be made at the end of July and September applicants must complete their projects by next details are available on the MHDC Rural Fund webpages. Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
