Horsted Keynes is a particularly attractive village in the heart of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is a medium sized village of approximately 650 homes. The parish church is a grade 1 listed building and there are many other grade 2 listed buildings within the parish. Much of the village is within a conservation area and it is approximately 2km from the Ashdown Forest. It is known by many who have passed through on the Bluebell Railway and visited its station. Others may associate it with being the home of the former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who is buried in our churchyard.

It will be clear to most that Horsed Keynes is a very special village and worthy of all the protection that is in place to preserve and enhance it for future generations.

There are very few opportunities for development within the current built up boundary of our village and due to the fact that the surrounding countryside is protected (for very good reason) there are is very limited scope for providing additional housing. However, like many others, we have endured the painful process of developing a Neighbourhood Plan which is currently under review by Mid Sussex District Council. The task faced by our Parish Council was a thankless one. A large proportion of villagers were understandably very concerned about the lack of affordable housing for young people and wanted to see more development to alleviate this problem.  An equally large number of residents wanted to see the village and surrounding countryside protected with appropriate constraints on development. After two separate “calls for land”, various workshops and the required consultation, we finally came up with a plan for around 40 additional homes for the period up to 2031. This may not seem like a lot, but for a village such as ours, with all the associated constraints, it is considered by many to be a realistic figure.
Unfortunately we are still some way away from having our Neighbourhood Plan formally “made” and due to the well documented problems with the emerging Mid Sussex District Plan, it would seem that during this period of uncertainty, Horsted Keynes is to be a target for developers seeking to exploit the situation, with no respect for the countryside or the National Planning Policy Framework.

We have raised our concerns with our MP Sir Nicolas Soames and attended one of his surgeries. Sir Nicolas was very concerned about the plight of our village and many others in his constituency. He was very sympathetic to our cause and we will continue to seek his support where we can.

We contacted CPRE and have had a number of meetings with their local representative Michael Brown and we cannot express enough the admiration that we have for the work that he and the organisation are doing on our behalf and for future generations to come.
We have also attended one of the public hearing days on the Government Inspector’s review of the Mid Sussex District Plan. We were impressed by the representations made but left totally dismayed by the Inspector’s interim findings on housing numbers, as he appears to have disregarded everything that has been said about constraints to development in the AONB.

We found that within our village people were getting very concerned about potential development sites immediately adjacent to their homes and were actively seeking to deflect development to other parts of the village. This was tearing the village apart and setting villager against villager. It then became clear that, whilst we were busy doing this, the developers were circling our village drawing up their plans. We had to find a way to bring the village back together and to make people understand the dangers of what is going on. A lot of misinformation was being spread around the village and people were not getting the clear facts, so we set up an action group, aimed at keeping people informed and up-to-date with what was going on regarding our Neighbourhood Plan and potential large developments. We accept that people have differing views and opinions on housing but we wanted to make sure people made informed decisions for the future of our village. We set up a website (ourhorstedkeynes.com) and put a leaflet through the door of all the houses in the village inviting people to register for updates.
This has proved to be a reasonably successful way of communicating with people and we have so far alerted subscribers to Outline Planning Applications for two major housing developments on Greenfield sites outside the built up boundary of the village (that were not within our draft Neighbourhood Plan). The response from villagers and the strength of opinions expressed by people objecting to these applications was absolutely overwhelming, but we are still awaiting MSDC’s decisions on these applications.

We are expecting outline planning applications to be submitted for at least two other major developments very shortly (in similarly unsuitable site locations) and there are a number of other sites that pose potential threats to our village. If approval is given to any one of these additional sites, we consider it will have a significantly harmful effect on our beautiful village, but the combined effect of development on a number, or all, of these sites would be disastrous!

Below is a schedule indicating the extent of the threat to development in Horsted Keynes.