A group of thousands of Finchampstead residents have formally submitted a petition to block housing development in the area.

A planning permission request was placed by Gladman Developers LTD, with the aim of building a new set of homes including affordable housing on the fields by Finchampstead Road next to Sand Martins golf course. 

Yesterday the official petition was handed over to Director of Finance and Resources at Wokingham Borough Council - Graham Ebers, who said it was too early to comment on the outcome. 

Robert Stanton, a councillor in Finchampstead, was instrumental in helping to organise the petition movement. 

He said: "The crux of this application is for 80 houses, they want them situated right outside Sand Martins Golf Course, which is actually countryside, it isn't building land, they also want to turn the two fields each side of Finchampstead road, known as Washington fields, into the SANG (park).

"The Finchampstead road takes 10,900 cars a day on average, so to walk around the SANG you've got to walk over the road, that idea isn't just ludicrous, it's very dangerous. 

"As far as the houses go, the difficulty with that is that it's going to be built on land between Finchampstead and Wokingham, and would close the gap between the two, they'd just become the same. this is the last piece of land that separates Finchampstead and Wokingham.

"It would close that down, and you'd have no countryside left whatsoever. we're not anti-development, we're keen to put it in the right place, and after all Wokingham has a local plan that is approved by the building expectorate, for anything up to 13,500 houses over the next ten years, and we think that is sufficient.

"If they want to develop here, they need to develop in land that is approved for building, these guys aren't doing that, and that is our strong objection. They're trying to take up the countryside. 

"There's been over 400 letters of rejection which is very high, but the most impressive piece of work has been the petition, where over 2,300 people have signed. It's certainly the biggest petition I've witnessed, having been a councillor here for 16 years. 

"It just shows the strength of feeling in that one particular area."
Robert's first point of call for raising support for the petition was Neil Willby, who played a pivotal role in getting signatures on the list.

"We got a leaflet through the door from Gladman developers telling us they were going to try and build houses on a bit of land that supports a lot of wildlife, they're going to put a SANG in, which is a developer trick to try and make people buy into it. 

"Rob rang me and said 'if you're prepared to get involved on a local level, I'll support you from the council side.' 

"We decided the best way to do it was to try and make it easy for people, I looked at it as if I was on the other side of the fence, what would I want to hear? 

"We ended up with over 600 objections to the housing development, over 500 objections to the park, we collected about 2,243 signatures, Sand Martins collected 273, so for our area it's one in four people. 

"You're going to give it everything you can, you're going to give it as much energy as you can, you're going to be as proactive as you can, you're going to be as creative as you can, but at the end of the day it's going to go in front of a planning committee.

"It's got to send a message out to Wokingham Borough Council, it's got to send a message out to Gladman's, who are just a bunch of speculators.

"There's a lot of wildlife in that field, there's badgers, deer, foxes, and whatever these developers say, and how clever they might be, you can't relocate natre, and once it's gone, it's gone, and then what are you going to do?"