'Tearing into the fabric of Stroud and Rodborough'

I've felt very tired ever since waking this morning and haven't got out of first gear. Late this afternoon I went to town to renew some library books before attending a public display of outline plans to build 115 houses at the very edge of town

I knew I shouldn't have gone as soon as I entered the Imperial Hotel next to the station. I could just feel the atmosphere created by the planing consultants and the developers was tense. The room was packed to see the proposed new housing estate at Rodborough Fields, a lovely looking meadow area adjacent to the to the south bank of the River Frome, which marks the boundary between Stroud and this neighbouring parish.

The town council is always having to juggle the definite need for new houses with the damage to the beautiful landscape that that might cause. The real problem is that the developers always go for the easiest option, a green field site, rather than taking on the brown field sites of which there are many in the valleys, where old industrial sites have been abandoned.

We are gearing up for a fight to prevent a similar development in the adjacent Slad valley at a site called Baxter's fields. I was told this afternoon that those plans have just been submitted to the District Planning department. My source was Geoff, the head of the local CPRE, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, who had this morning met a journalist from the Daily Mail who wanted to see the site for an article. It will be interesting to see which way they angle the story, as the conservatives are quite keen on protecting their own neighbourhoods from development, when they are so attractive, whilst they are trying to free up the national planning process to make it much easier for developers to build where they want and not where the residents would wish.

I took this picture over the shoulder of Hugh, on the left, who was a very senior university academic specialising in sustainable urban planning. I know him, as he has just returned to being a trustee of Stroud Preservation Trust, and is a very useful and informed contact for us all. He was discussing the sketched designs of the developers with Tim, who is a very active member of the local Civic Society. What this map doesn't show is the new bridge over the river which would be needed to get any car access to the site. An old easement owned by Network Rail from the 1850s will be their solution for a price.

There were many familiar faces amongst the crowds and when I left I said hello to another large group, from the Rodborough Fields Preservation Group, who had assembled outside to counter the arguments. (You can sign their petition on their website, as well as seeing some interesting pictures of the fields.) I should have taken pictures of them, but it was dark and very wet outside.

On their leaflet, I noticed that the land was originally medieval ridge and furrow field systems, before it became used for drying cloth from the local mills on 'tenterhooks'. The river Frome's banks are a major wildlife corridor and have kingfishers, dippers and wagtails and otters. It would be such a loss to lose all that.

The title of today's journal is the tag line of the Groups pamphlet