Viable alternatives for Ashdown

The case for carving up Ashdown, a place of internationally significant heritage, and building 47 suburban luxury homes here, is that there is no viable alternative. This is wrong.

Ashdown was used as a preparatory school from 1886 to 2020. During COVID-19, which had a profoundly negative impact on boarding schools, the Prep Schools Trust took the decision to consolidate its debts by closing the school. Ashdown was sold to a property developer for £5.95 million during a very depressed market for large non-residential property in the UK. The Latrobe Heritage Trust understands that there was considerable interest from charities and educational institutions, including a child carers’ respite charity, several schools and Chinese firms which intended to maintain the site in educational use, but they were outbid by a developer.

The buildings and facilities remain configured for a wide variety of educational and institutional uses. The expenditure they require for continued use as such is very limited as compared to the cost of demolition and housing development, which the application estimates to create 3,572 tonnes of landfill waste. The exorbitant cost of these works is the reason these proposals are so excessive: the developer requires suburban housing to pay for their costly and manifestly greedy desire to carve up the Latrobe building into nine luxury duplex and triplex apartments. Installing gyms, home cinemas and 16ft-wide lift shafts in Grade II* listed buildings is rarely cheap, and rarely wise.

Retaining mixed residential and institutional/educational use would have minimal impact on the heritage of the site while continuing to provide (i) utility to the community and (ii) a level of public access and appreciation for the heritage at Ashdown. The existing more modern buildings can be clearly read and understood as part of Ashdown’s longstanding educational function. The same could never be said for a set of suburban streets with wholly inappropriate off-the-shelf Oakwrights houses: so this scenario would have a far lesser negative heritage impact while providing more viably for Ashdown than a fragmented development - and in the meantime than a developer who chooses not to make available the relatively modest amounts of money necessary to stop water pouring through his roof.

The south-east of England has a profound housing crisis, but this won’t be resolved by destroying internationally significant heritage to build expensive, high-carbon homes, at the end of 1000 metres of a winding single-lane road, with no prospect of a viable community, no access to local jobs, schools and GPs already at full capacity. The LHT absolutely recognises this crisis. If Even Group were to have acquired land in Forest Row and sought to build 37 new houses (as faithful recreations of Ashdown House or otherwise), we would have fully supported them.

The developer has used a loophole, arguing that there is a net reduction in building footprint due to the removal of various barns (while not counting new bicycle sheds and bin stores), to avoid an estimated nearly £2 million in Community Infrastructure Levy contributions for local services. The same loophole is employed to justify the proposed level of affordable housing provision: nil.

An alternative viable scheme would be a more limited residential and mixed use. There is no financial imperative behind the proposed subdivision of the main house into nine luxury apartments. It could exist - as it has perfectly well for 230 years - as one, or potentially two (with no horizontal subdivision, maintaining existing rear partitions), units. The remaining buildings could be in institutional, commercial or residential use with little alteration, at a fraction of the associated cost, at a lower level of occupancy placing less pressure on the very limited transport infrastructure and local services available.

A further alternative viable scheme would be mixed use, as above, with the main Latrobe building serving as a museum and cultural/musical centre. The Latrobe Heritage Trust will continue to explore avenues of possibility of such a scheme depending on the progress of this application, local opinion and potential financial support.