Homes guru Beeny in a battle with neighbours
SHE has been contending with a gruelling round of chemotherapy as she battles breast cancer. But, as if that were not enough, Property Ladder star Sarah Beeny has caused uproar with her latest landscaping project — provoking objections from two parish councils and being damned by a neighbour as ‘intolerable’.
It wasn’t what Beeny, 51, and her husband, artist Graham Swift, had in mind when they began building their seven-bedroom ‘ mini Downton’ at the 220-acre Somerset farm they snapped up for £3 million in 2018.
Part of their vision included a lake — to be created at the back of the house by scooping huge amounts of earth out of a field. But there has been barely contained outrage at how the spoil was disposed of.
Beeny and Swift used it to build up an embankment on the edge of a field, thereby heightening their privacy and, simultaneously, diminishing the noise of passing traffic — at least, the noise they experience.
Unfortunately, this artful bit of landscaping — for which the couple failed to secure planning permission — has been derided by one local parish council.
Objecting to the couple’s bid for retrospective permission, it argues that they have ‘changed the landscape for the worse’ and adds, witheringly: ‘ It would appear no engineering design or thought has gone into the creation of these banks.’
Another parish council says the landscaping has come at a high sonic price for those on the other side of the road. ‘The height and shape of the earth bank . . . is having the effect of reflecting traffic noise back towards [them], adversely affecting the residents’ living conditions.’
Two say the noise in their gardens is ‘intolerable’. Another claims the couple ‘dumped the spoils on good agricultural land and [are] trying to find a way out of a problem they created’.