THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT. Without you we cannot keep up our campaign fight.
We have now launched a petition calling for Canterbury City Council to protect and enhance the Blean landscape and woodland complex as a vital hub of biodiversity, heritage, agriculture, and community well-being for the benefit of future generations.
We hope that by linking the Save The Blean, Brooklands Farm and Dunkirk/Winterbourne Fields campaigns we can get the Council to listen. We will be submitting the completed petition to the Council (and the University of Kent) early in the new year.
Sign the petition online here or sign a physical copy during November and December in your local Parish Hall – Tyler Hill, Blean or Rough Common. Details can also be found on the STB Facebook page.
Why we’ve launched this petition
Blean woods is one of the largest and most distinctive areas of ancient woodland in
the UK. It is the site of the world-leading Wilder Blean rewilding project, which has
successfully reintroduced European Bison to the woods along with Longhorn Cattle,
Exmoor Ponies and Iron-Age Pigs. It also has multiple nationally and internationally
recognised areas of importance, including Sites of Special Scientific Interest and
Special Areas of Conservation.
Blean woods are a hotspot for the rare and iconic heath fritillary butterfly, and Red-list
woodland birds including lesser-spotted woodpeckers, nightingales and spotted
flycatchers. Several invertebrate species thought extinct in the UK have also been
recently recorded. With only 2.5% of the UK covered by ancient woodland,
protecting every hectare is vital.
But as with many of the UK’s natural areas, the Blean has been fragmented by
farming and unsustainable development. This has resulted in isolated pockets of
woodland, limiting the movement of wildlife and important conservation grazing
animals, and restricting public access across the Blean.
Now the Blean Woodland Complex is under further threat from at least three large-
scale housing developments (totalling almost 5,000 houses), with all the associated
traffic, air pollution, light pollution, predation by pets and damage to the woodlands
themselves. Please sign our petition to stop these vast and unsustainable
developments, and protect these ancient woodlands for the benefit of the whole
district.
Stay informed
Don’t forget you can sign up to our newsletter via the footer here on the Save The Blean
website. We’ll keep you updated with all the latest on the campaign.
We need housing but not on areas protected for nature. Please do not develop Blean Woods
I own ancient woodland in South Blean and can see great harm to the biodiversity should Winterbourne development be permitted. I have hours of video footage showing deer, badgers, foxes, tawny owls, buzzards, redwings to name a few. Building homes surrounded by woodland is a poor decision.
Stop building and destroying our Woodlands green spaces need to be left alone, we need to save them and make sure our wildlife can thrive, survive.
The government has promised to restore and protect 30% of our land for nature. This can’t be done by threatening the survival of wildlife in special places like the Blean with the associated problems of building in proximity to it or destroying natural corridors. Houses here will bring with them water pollution, air pollution, disturbance from increased visitors, more loss of wildlife from cat predation, dog fouling, light and noise pollution.
Restore nature, not destroy it. Every green space needs to be protected for our own well being and for future generations
This is a totally different prospect to the development at Brooklands farm. There isn’t the infrastructure to support 2000 new homes in the area. Given that those living in the development is intended to serve as additional housing for the Canterbury area, the construction and residential traffic will overload the small village roads in the area along with the A299 as the main access road into Canterbury from the North. Honey Hill, Blean Hill and Tyler Hill are already in heavy use and any accidents on these roads serve to shut down the area, causing huge congestion in and out of the city. If there were clear plans to use the existing green corridors for those living in a smaller development it might be considerably more sustainable but in its current form this plan not only builds on significant areas of ecological value, but saturates an area that doesn’t have the infrastructure to support such a development. Also if a new three form entry school is to be built to replace the existing school, it needs to be constructed before any closure and demolition of the existing school and the site location needs to prioritise the existing students and families that currently study and work there. Whilst there may be a need for more development, the University needs to carefully consider the huge impact that 2000 properties would have on what is currently a small village surrounded by environmentally precious land.