It’s Trigger’s broom for the overheating property market: when is a house a new house?
Craig and Gaynor Arnold will likely have much time to ponder questions of authenticity while they get ready for work in their next Airbnb. The couple had an Arts and Crafts cottage just outside Guilford, but by the time they had added a side extension, a conservatory and detached garage, another single-storey rear extension and a two-sided extension, they had, well, more of a classic Surrey mansion, having added an extra 70% on to the original floorspace.
Now, after five years of haggling over blueprints in the high court and court of appeal, their floorspace is about to shrink back to zero. Surrey Council has ordered demolition of the entire structure, so miffed is it with the Arnolds’ lax attitude to building regulations.
It’s salutary stuff. Councils may sometimes seem fusty, but slow wheels grind fine: the long list of Brits who have been forced to pay for the bulldozers that demolished their dream homes is stark testimony to that.
In 2008, Syed Raza Shah bought a bungalow in Bedfordshire for £750,000. He was given permission to increase the floorspace by 45%, but somewhere, his finger must have slipped on the “order more floors” button because, by 2013, it had become two storeys higher, and increased in floorspace by 165%.
In February of this year, pensioner Simon Harbottle was pictured among the ruins of his newly demolished Cotswolds bungalow. He had originally got planning permission for a barn but had changed his mind halfway through the process, presumably because it’s easier to live in a house than a barn.
In 2008, builder Steve Woodfinden-Lewis of Woodford, Greater Manchester, blamed the demolition of his £600,000 house for the breakup of his marriage and a heart attack. But in the face of such tragedy, sometimes the way to redemption is to double down on your dream: he vowed to reconstruct a legal version of the house on the same site.
Andy and Frances Murray were forced to smithereen their £500,000 home in east Dunbartonshire after they claimed they were misled by a building firm. In 2012, the builders told the couple the home would meet council regulations and that planning consent would be “given retrospectively”. By the time the council pointed out it was 6ft too tall, 9ft too long, 4ft too wide, had too many windows and a balcony that would invade their neighbours’ privacy, the building company had gone into liquidation.
Surrey farmer Robert Fidler built a mock-Tudor castle and lived in it undisturbed for four years, hidden behind bales of hay. In 2006, though, he mistakenly believed he was safe from council objections and removed the hay. So began a nine-year battle that only ended when he was threatened with prison. He was unrepentant to the end: “If someone said to Picasso: ‘Rip up your best oil painting,’ he wouldn’t be able to do it. And neither can I.” Whether his pile had more in common with the paintings of George W Bush depends on how you view actual battlements and cannons on a modern home.
