A mother-of-three says she could be forced to sell her home at a cut-price because of the “devastating” impact of an axed HS2 line on her village.
Steph Wilkin and her ex-husband splashed out £1.175m on the Grade II-listed three-bedroom house in the leafy parish of Whitmore in Staffordshire in 2009, following success for the pair in running a local electronics assembly company.
But despite her love for the “wonderful home”, which sat on nine acres of land and featured two large lakes, the 56-year-old signed a financial settlement for Lake House to be sold, and for her to receive 62 per cent of the proceeds, after the couple divorced in 2020.
Having got the house valued at £1.2m the year before, Ms Wilkin, a topographical surveyor, hoped to take around £600,000 from the sale, which would have paid for a new home in West Sussex, where she wants to work part-time while being close to her grandson.
Money left over, she said, would have gone to a private pension. Meanwhile, the house she bought after moving out of Lake House would be rented out to help with her monthly income.
However, Ms Wilkin said her future plans were thrown into the air by the impact of the expected arrival of the second leg of the high-speed HS2 line through a tunnel west of her village, which triggered panic among local residents unable to sell up.
The pair, however, were able to secure an agreement with HS2 for it to buy their home on behalf of the Department for Transport – but when the offer came in for £757,500, Ms Wilkin saw her expected proceeds from the sale fall to around £284,000.
Now, after delaying the decision to sell, she faces a divorce hearing in November, where she could be forced to sell the home, she said.
“If the judge forces me to sell to HS2, I come away with my £280k-odd and I can’t do absolutely anything about it,” she told The Independent.
“It’s devastating to think how much we paid for it, then renovated the property, making it a wonderful house, before HS2 was planned, and the value was wiped away, along with future plans I had with the money.
“Whitmore was the ‘Beverley Hills of Stoke-on-Trent’, but since the line was proposed, no one can sell, no one wants to move here, it’s dramatically impacted the housing market, and the local community.
“Even now, two years after the line was cancelled [in October 2023], it’s a ghost town, a shadow of the village it once was.”
HS2 arrived at the final offer, which was made after three valuations, ranging wildly from £1.4m to £615,000. The amount was the average of the two closest valuations – and there was no opportunity to appeal.
A spokesperson for HS2 said the valuations were based on the property as if there were no plans for the high-speed line, and are reviewed by at least one Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors-registered surveyor.
The alternative for Ms Wilkin and her ex-husband is to sell on the open market.
But Ms Wilkin said: “Its a beautiful area and the HS2 line is not going through here any more, but no one wants to come here because of the stories and the security coming round to patrol empty homes already bought up.
“It just shows the devastating impact of the line on a once-beautiful village, which will never even be built.”
It is a similar situation in the nearby hamlet of Whitmore Heath, according to those who lived there. Some 35 of the 50 homes in the village were bought by HS2, many of them lavish mansions with large gardens.
“Whitmore Heath was the jewel of the area, but the community has been fragmented,” Ashfield District councillor Paul Northcott said previously. “It’s been ripped apart by people coming in and going, people renting short-term.”
Earlier this year, The Independent reported on one man in the hamlet who sold his home to HS2, only to later discover it had been turned into a cannabis factory.
Commenting on Ms Wilkin’s case, a spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said: “HS2 Ltd has a responsibility to establish a price that is fair both for homeowners and the taxpayer with a range of properties [sic] schemes available to support people living near the railway.
“Having reviewed the case, we are confident that the offer made for Lake House represents a fair estimate of what the property would have been worth today, had HS2 not been planned.”
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