The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Locals can’t afford to live here any more’
Burnham Market residents want to limit the sale of second homes, but the picturesque Norfolk village still welcomes visitors, says Sally Howard
With its quaint village green and flint shopfronts colonised by upscale boutiques, Burnham Market is the archetypal chocolate box Norfolk village. Today, this community of 948 souls – nicknamed “Chelsea-on-Sea” after the London second homeowners who historically snapped up properties here – is the latest battleground in the war between tourists, holiday homeowners and exasperated locals.
Last month, the residents of Burnham Market, which is a short drive from the sand and dune beaches of the north Norfolk coast, backed a bid to limit the number of new second homes and holiday lets in the village, putting conditions on new developments requiring them to be “principal residences” and banning existing homes becoming holiday retreats.
In all, 635 residents and second-homers were eligible to vote in the referendum, with 201 casting their ballot and 161 people, or 80.1 per cent of voters, backing the motion. The proposal will now become part of the village plan and will be consulted by West Norfolk Council when it considers planning applications.
Dennis Clark, chairman of the parish council, told Telegraph Travel: “The price of homes is well beyond the reach of local people thanks to second homes. The vote is an attempt to encourage lower-cost housing so that people who work here can live here.”
The average price of a property in Burnham Market is £1million, with annual salaries around £32,000, close to the national average. Tourism, including second home-ownership, contributes around £28million a year to the north Norfolk economy.
However, the vote has divided the town. Anthony Green, 49, a carpenter who was raised in Burnham Market but now lives in a small hamlet 20 minutes’ drive away, said that he feels the changes to his home village are “really sad” and that he welcomes the referendum vote.
“Locals like me can’t afford to live in Burnham Market, loads of homes are shut up even at Christmas and normal businesses like the pharmacy and baker’s shop have gone,” Green says. “These days it’s just posh gift shops.”
Maxwell Graham-Wood, 64, has run Satchells wine merchants in the village since 1990 and is the former head of Burnham Market Traders Association. He believes the referendum vote was “undemocratic” as local businesses were not allowed to vote, and that it was provoked by “envy”.
He says: “People need to accept that north Norfolk is a tourist region. My business and many others would go under without tourists as locals don’t shop in the village: they drive down the road to Lidl.” In his view, the referendum is an attempt to “turn back time to an idyll that never existed”.
He adds: “What do you want to do, ban people from going on holiday? Ban Norfolk folk from going to Cornwall?”
Burnham Market’s use of planning legislation to tackle a tourism-borne housing crisis is not unique. In 2016, St Ives’ residents voted through a development plan which stipulates that newly built homes in the Cornish resort can only be sold as a “principal residence”.
Fowey and Mevagissey followed suit, as well as Brighton and Burnham Market’s neighbours Wells-next-the-Sea and (in Suffolk) Southwold. The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, will allow councils to double the rate of council tax paid on second homes in England, as has been the case in Wales since 2021, and also contains proposals to restrict the conversion of long lets into Airbnbs, perhaps through local licensing schemes.
Local estate agent Spencer Cushing feels the referendum is based on an outdated take on the village’s woes.
“Since Covid, [property] buyers are looking to move here permanently,” he says, “one in four are moving from within north Norfolk”.
Cushing believes that the idea of a division between “locals” and “incomers” is also based on a false premise: “You get people like me, former locals, who move back home to Norfolk to raise families, and you get people who buy second homes for a few years but then move here permanently… There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’.”
Wanda Djebba, 63, a second homeowner in Burnham Market believes that the village’s rich tapestry of sometime residents is being unfairly blamed for irritations that spring from the “Airbnb-isation” of the village.
Djebba owns The Tuscan Farm shop, which stocks extra virgin olive oil and wine grown on Djebba’s organic farm in Italy at a premises on the village green.
Djebba says that the influx of wealth from businesses such as hers supports essential local infrastructure. The Tuscan Farm Shop has funded facilities in the local primary school, a village flower show and carnival and, with others in the Burnham Market Traders Association, the annual Christmas village lights: “This is not something that these Airbnbs do, is it?”
Dennis Clark told Telegraph Travel that as a next sally in the battle he would like to see short let properties’ exemption from council tax addressed by cen- tral Government: “Second homeowners pay council tax, but short let properties can structure themselves as businesses and contribute nothing to our local community,” he says.
A London-based Burnham Market cottage owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity, owns one of 83 properties currently listed on Airbnb in Burnham
Market. She believes she makes an “ethical” choice in listing her second home on the lettings portal.
“My cottage is booked 230 days of the year and this brings jobs and income to the local economy,” she says. “It is the second homes that are the problem. They are vacant all but 30 days of the year and don’t contribute to the economy as they consume housing stock.”
While she avoids council tax by structuring her second home as a business, she would welcome a more progressive taxation regime on holiday lets. “I want to do my bit for the village then move here when I retire,” she says.
Tourism academic Professor C Michael Hall studies the tensions around short lets and second home ownership in the world’s tourist honeypots. He says emotions run especially high in the UK, as a result of our historic failure to address housing availability.
“Short lets and second home developments can boost local economies if done in the right way,” Hall says. “But for this you need higher local taxes for unoccupied housing and good available housing stock for local people.”
Nina Plumbe, a retired fruit farmer, says that she sees “both sides, rather painfully” in Burnham Market’s increasingly heated debate. The 73-year-old owns a complex of holiday lets in her own barn conversion and two cottages in nearby Burnham Thorpe, which she rents to locals at affordable rents rather than turning them over to Airbnb.
One problem, in Plumbe’s view, is the deathly slow march of planning permission because of local nimbyism. “My 42-year-old daughter is living in a three-bedroom cottage with her four children and would love to build her own home,” she says.
Despite this, Plumbe wouldn’t turn the clock back to a time before the arrival of tourist wealth. “I love the hubbub of summer when the tourists arrive in Burnham Market,” she says, “and I love the fine restaurants we have now, like the tapas place Socius and [bar and restaurant with rooms] NoTwenty9. Time was, my parents had to drive down the coast to Weybourne for a night out, which was run by a stern Swiss chef.”
Green says that even with the referendum it’s “much too late” for locals like him to have any hope of affording to buy in Burnham Market, where blue cheese and walnut mini pastries go for £6 a pop at posh delis and beer is £7 a pint. “Locals have to move to the cheaper bits or leave north Norfolk entirely,” he says.
With Devon, the Isle of Wight and the Lake District considering their own tourism policy curbs, and disquiet growing in beach resorts such as Whitstable, the battle for the soul of the UK’s honeypot towns will rage on.
In the meantime, Cushing predicts that there will be little let up in tourist footfall to a village that’s become a fixture on bucket lists of the UK’s most picturesque villages. “Burnham Market has loads of natural beauty and is a stone’s throw from globally famous sandy beaches,” he says. “No local row is going to change that.”