End of Redhill?
 

Surrey Mirror reporting that the owners of Redhill Aerodrome plan to build 4500 houses on the site. ☹️ 💷

there maybe an aviation covenant on the site - needs to be checked or perhaps someone to get airfield listed if possible (historic interest>)

or do they want new houses that locals will not be be to afford

Great place to build houses on a site that waterlogs!

All thanks to John Prescott not excluding them, so classed as brown field sites even in the green belt.
Soon not only will you need to own an aircraft but the airfield to fly it from as well.

Labour always screw up aviation in someway from cancelling the first 1000mph aircraft to funding technical failures now its the loss of airfields.

The government needs further petitioning on the subject to holt the loss.

Just out of curiosity...

Considering that you can't build on areas susceptible to flooding - and that no one in their right minds would buy a property on land that is regularly waterlogged and occasionally flooded.

How on earth will they pull that off?

There is a whole "village" built on a flood plane in Kettering. They just built funky drainage to get round it.

They just built a couple of hundred "dwellings" in huge hideous boxes on a site in a lovely Bedfordshire town that I used to live next to in which they lost a HiMac 10 - 12 yrs ago when it went to dig drainage ditches, so soft and boggy was the ground. I sunk up to the roof due to vibration liquefaction.
The ground is pretty close to Fuller's Earth, a substance that shows similar thixotropic properties to cornflour. It is in a valley through which runoff water flows. Good luck, residents! Were you even told? The heck you were!

Oddly enough since then I have never managed to find the press reports of that well publicised incident. Curious, that!

Loads of dry, flat land around there too.

Well known that lots of little brown envelops change hands in one way or other to lubricate the planning process and what do the developers and builders care they just walk away with the money very corrupt industry.

Its a shame - maybe all of us should get together and buy out these places jointly. Build a few houses near the non-instrument strip (or instrument strip if we want to have instrument approaches), sell the houses near the airfield with proper double / triple glazing to make back some of the purchase cost, invite our new neighbours to join in on social nights, and take part in general aviation. And perhaps we may very well end up breaking even, as well as of course keeping airfields open!

Many years ago I pointed out to a meeting of Redhill noise protesters who wanted no hard runway or the airfield closed what had happened to West Malling when the noise lobby got it closed. A large green open space became a HUGE industrial and housing estate with traffic rumbling through the surrounding rural roads. It didn't convince them; completely obsessed with their short term aims.
Interestingly, during a very dry summer, the layout of the field drains could be seen. Apparently during WW2, the runway was lengthened and some of the drains' connections to the southern ditch destroyed, exacerbating the flooding problem.

4500 homes... That's at least 9,000 more cars because the aerodrome isn't particularly close to public transport.

You then will have at least around 10,000 more people in the supermarket queues etc... You'd need to build new roads, new supermarkets, new schools, new sewage plants... It'll be a mess!

Also - at Redhill, there are no planes flying at night (between say 10pm and 7am) - however, if you have 9,000 more cars, chances are that at least some will be driving at night, causing much more noise pollution than the few planes flying on a nice day!

Perhaps logic isn't something that should be dabbled with people who are so focussed on the wrong solution to a slight nuisance on the odd flyable day (which they should have known about before moving there as the aerodrome has been there for decades!)

I wonder if they would be able to build some houses closer to the runway with proper sound insulation so as to make the land owners happy with rent coming in, and boosting recurring profits whilst still retaining the airfield? Most working families aren't home during the day, so operational noise would only affect the weekends really. Just have a clause in the rent stating that operational noise from the airfield is to be expected, but due to triple glazing sound inside the properties would be kept to an absolute minimum!

That many houses might justify the provision of a bus service or two....

Haha - maybe, but people generally prefer not to be bound by bus times (which in practice, especially in winter means freezing to death, whilst being rained on and catching a cold whilst waiting for the bus service which is running substantially late (or was running early and left before you got there, or was cancelled due to lack of drivers). Which is an all but too common occurrence in Surrey/Kent. I know very few people who live outside of London and use public transport from their homes as their primary transportation method. I think just contemplating doing the weekly / biweekly shop on a bus for a family of 3+ doesn't sound plausible to me.

I'd still waiver the "Be careful what you wish for" to people campaigning to shut down the aerodrome.

Shurely from the land owner's point of view turning a low income light industrial site into housing will release a large capital sum.
Nothing on that score to do with what the existing South Nutfield residents think either way !

mike hallam.

p.s. I feel sorry for the many small businesses on the filed who once more have their future well being placed in jeopardy.

Any would be resident of any new build should read this before considering moving to the area.
https://www.rrdrua.org.uk/2016/07/05...-isnt-working/