Latest news with #Shropshire
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Green-fingered locals living on street named after Blue Peter gardener Percy Thrower fight to stop developers bulldozing their lawns for affordable homes
Residents on a street named after Blue Peter gardener Percy Thrower are fighting to stop developers bulldozing their lawns and flowerbeds. Locals on Percy Thrower Avenue in Bonmere Heath, Shropshire, face losing a third of their back gardens, which many have tended to for decades. Landowner Housing Plus Group is building 19 affordable homes on a field behind the properties. The company claims around six residents have illegally encroached on their land and are now threatening to take it back. The firm wrote to residents on May 21 giving them 28 days to clear their gardens 'before taking action to remove the encroachment'. The company claims the residents' gardens have strayed beyond the legal boundary and onto land not belonging to them. But residents say the developers are wrong and have lodged an appeal to temporarily stop the bulldozers. Resident Alex Titley, 45, said the developers are demanding she gives up 2.5m (8.2ft) of her garden. The mother-of-one, who has lived in her home for 20 years, said this would mean she would lose two trees and her beloved shed. The 45-year-old said: 'My garden is my sanctuary. It's a peaceful place for me while I struggle to cope with my daughter's health problems. 'The anxiety this has caused is unbelievable. 'To think these people think they can just wade in and demand a quarter of it when it is inside our registered boundary is absurd.' Neighbour Jonathan Kessel-Fell, 54, said: 'We have been looking after the boundary, which is on their deeds, for 20 years. 'We're all in really busy jobs and our gardens are our sanctuary. 'The fences were due to be taken down any time from Wednesday which is 28 days since the letters were sent. 'We've since been told by the developer that this won't happen while the legal dispute is going on. Ms Tidley said: 'My garden is my sanctuary. It's a peaceful place for me while I struggle to cope with my daughter's health problems' 'We're not against the houses being built, we just want a conversation with the construction company and the landowner.' The land dispute is just a mile from the family home of the late TV gardening legend Percy Thrower. The star was considered Britain's first celebrity gardener, appearing on dozens of TV shows including Blue Peter BBC's Gardeners' World. He died in 1988 but his daughter Margaret still lives in the family home in the village. One local said: 'It's the cruellest of ironies that people living on a road named after Britain's most famous gardener may have to watch their own gardens being bulldozed for housing. 'It's an absolute outrage and the developers should be utterly ashamed of themselves.' The residents have hired solicitors Lanyon Bowdler, in nearby Shrewsbury, to help them save their gardens. A spokesperson said: 'The boundary fences have been there for 20 years. 'They are in the right place and even if they were not in 2004, over time they have become the boundary.' A Housing Plus Group spokesperson said: 'We are aware of the concerns raised by residents on Percy Thrower Avenue regarding the ongoing land issue. 'We understand that this situation has caused uncertainty, we will work with all parties to reach an amicable and fair resolution.'
BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
Jail for Shawbury man who killed Kidderminster girlfriend in crash
A man has been jailed for five and a half years for causing the death of his girlfriend in a crash on a country Vaughan, 17, from Kidderminster, was the passenger in a car driven by Logan Addison, 20, when it came off the road near Shawbury Heath in Shropshire on 4 February passing sentence at Shrewsbury Crown Court, Judge Deni Matthews said: "The people of this county need protection [from Addison]".Earlier Ms Vaughan's mother, Leanne Vaughan, told the court: "My whole world fell apart. It felt as if the ground beneath me vanished. I collapsed, the weight of it all crushing me." Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
BBC News
11 hours ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Shropshire's Nesscliffe army site still housing Afghan families
An army camp that was adapted as a short-term home for Afghan families, who escaped the Taliban in 2023, is still being used, it has to 200 families and individuals moved to the base at Nesscliffe in Shropshire in 2023, under the Government's Afghan resettlement was designed to help those who'd assisted the UK mission in Afghanistan and Shropshire Council said in November 2023 they were only expected to stay for six authority said there have been no arrivals since Feb 2025 and attempts to find suitable homes for six remaining families were continuing. When the families moved in, people living in the area had raised concerns about people walking on the narrow lanes around Nesscliffe and about the lack of facilities. Local residents thanked When approached again by the BBC, the council said "no end date was confirmed, only that the site was to be used temporally, as needed".After the last families leave, it will be returned to Ministry of Defence (MoD) use. The council has confirmed the camp had been funded by the government and the authority has not received any money to use the MoD said the UK had "a moral obligation to resettle Afghans eligible under the Afghan Resettlement Programme" to get them "away from the threat of the Taliban".It said Nesscliffe was "an important staging post for Afghans when they first arrive in the UK" and thanked local residents for helping the families "feel welcome, valued, and part of the community"."It is clear that the Defence Estate is not the long-term solution to housing requirements for all Afghan resettlement schemes," the MoD confirmed. Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Death is complicated and kaleidoscopically beautiful': Jerskin Fendrix on his emotional new album – and life after Oscar success
The sun is shining, birds are tweeting and a river gently flows just yards away as Jerskin Fendrix tells me about his love of growing up in Shropshire. 'It was so gorgeous and majestic,' he says, sitting in the garden of a friend's house where he spent a lot of time in his youth. 'It was nature, forests and hills and then just normal teenage life. The combination of this numinous, big landscape and getting wasted in a cornfield with your mates listening to Kanye West on a Bluetooth speaker while seeing a massive sunset.' Such vivid scenes fill his latest album, Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire. The opening track, Beth's Farm, captures an idyllic scene where animals roam and rural teens party. 'I thought it was a really nice symbol of this naive innocence,' he says. 'Trying to get across how bucolic and heavenly this was before it starts to get corrupted.' The corruption he speaks of is some recent personal turmoil that has at once intensified, sharpened and darkened the reflective lens he's looking back through. 'A close friend of mine killed himself,' he says. 'Then more stuff happened, and more people died.' He wrote about it as a means of dealing with it, along with exploring the complexities and contradictions of grief. 'We're taught by songs or Hollywood films that someone dies and then there's very slow strings and you cry for six months and it gradually gets better,' he says. 'That's not how it works. Sometimes it's not as bad as you think, sometimes it's way worse. It can be trivial, funny or sometimes it's these massively different combinations at the same time. Death is the same thing as life – it's as complicated and kaleidoscopically beautiful.' Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire reflects these vast, knotty emotions. It's bold and dramatic, heart-wrenching, vulnerable, intimate and funny. From eruptive post-rock to sweeping chamber pop via avant classical explorations, tender ballads and group sing-alongs around the family piano, it's a singular piece of work. Joscelin Dent-Pooley was assigned the name Jerskin Fendrix as a joke by a friend at school and it stuck. A trained pianist and violinist, he moved to London in the late 2010s to be in the band Famous, but soon began playing solo shows and collaborating with the likes of Black Midi. His 2020 debut album, Winterreise, touched on hyper-pop, warped electro and leftfield baritone ballads. It was a cult record but it caught the ear of acclaimed film director Yorgos Lanthimos, who has since employed Fendrix to score three films: Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness and the upcoming Bugonia. The former even landed Fendrix an Oscar nomination and he's buzzing about the next one. 'It's gonna be sick,' he enthuses. 'It's a wild film. I'm very proud of it. We got a 90-piece orchestra, so it's a big fucking score.' However, we are deliberately back on home soil to talk about his latest record. Which is not always an easy process. One of the people Fendrix lost during the writing of the record was his father, whose death was sudden and unexpected. Before many of his answers, he takes a long inhale and sits in silence before answering. He tailgates cigarette after cigarette, blazing his way through a pack of Camel Blues. While the album is rich and joyful, it also contains real pain and anguish. Fendrix stretched his voice to new places, both emotionally and in terms of its register. 'I really pushed myself,' he says. 'To have gone through so many things that were so unusual, new and testing, and then to make music that was safe and comfortable … it wouldn't have been reflective.' You can hear on some songs that he is close to breaking. 'I wanted to record it myself in my own little studio, and that was fairly brutal for my emotions,' he says. 'This was not very long after my father had died, and it was probably a good process, but it was a pretty heavy thing to impose on myself. There are some takes that just felt like self-punishment. I was very isolated, but I always felt people were with me. Having those ghosts there, of the living as well as dead, was almost conversational.' Experiencing such loss so close to home, Fendrix basked in memories of growing up nestled around a close-knit group of friends and family, being daft, 'getting ratted in the kitchen' at parties, and extracting beauty from the simple things you sometimes take for granted. 'A lot of people who grow up somewhere remote are like, 'Oh, it was shit and there was nothing to do',' he says. 'But being bored is fucking great because you invent things. Even if that's just being a dumbass. One has permission to find their life beautiful and not a lot of people give themselves that, regardless of what your environment is. And that's not necessarily somewhere idyllic or utopian but just to find a real deep, beautiful meaning in what's happened to you.' At the beginning of our conversation, Fendrix said to remind me to ask him about the river in front of us, as it was important. So as our conversation wraps, I bring it up. Another deep breath and long silence. 'My friend who died, we had his wake here,' he begins. 'And he really loved nature.' With eerie synchronicity, we are now cowering in a corner because the heavens have opened. Fendrix sucks down one last cigarette while looking out at the droplets hitting the flowing stream. 'A thing that happened that day really stuck with me: the water came all the way up to here, and the entire town was flooded overnight. It was like the river rose up to come and get him.' Once Upon a Time … in Shropshire is released via Untitled (Recs) on 10 October
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
Severn Valley Railway visit from Flying Scotsman sells out
Tickets for a visit by the Flying Scotsman to the Severn Valley Railway sold out in just three famous locomotive is due to visit the line, which runs between Bridgnorth and Kidderminster, next month to celebrate its full northern part of the track in Shropshire had to close in January due to a landslip and work has been carried out to make it safe railway said the sale of tickets on Wednesday had been a "real vote of confidence" and it was looking at the possibility of selling extra tickets, including options for on-train dining. The landslip at Mor Brook Bridge meant trains could go no further than Hampton Loade while the repairs were carried a fundraising appeal, contractors were employed to strengthen the embankment with concrete that is complete, the railway said it would re-lay the track and planned to carry out load testing before opening the line to Flying Scotsman would then be the first train to travel along the re-laid track on 25 July and would make more trips up and down the line on 26 and 27 about the ticket sales, Jonathan 'Gus' Dunster, the railway's managing director, said: 'We simply couldn't have wished for a better result than this."The railway is due to hold a Swinging Sixties weekend on 26 and 27 July and he encouraged people who had missed out on Flying Scotsman tickets to attend the event to see the train from the platform. Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
