A bit of really good news. Cider with Rosie after all!

Remember “Cider with Rosie no more?” last year? As we said at the time: “If you’ve been there, you’ll know it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that building 150 new houses at the entrance to the Slad Valley near Stroud in Gloucestershire would be one of the most vandalistic actions that could be committed in the whole of rural England. Not just because it is an incomparable Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty but also because it was immortalised by Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie”.

Well, just sometimes in this game things go right, money doesn’t win, the community does and it looks as if it’s happened there. “Only a bit of pottery” had been found in the developers’ trial trench, they announced to the world, carefully avoiding the fact they were keen to drive their greedy bulldozers straight into the spirit of a jewel of English literature. Stroud District Council told them to go to Hell or something like that but more polite. Undeterred, they appealed but now it has just been announced the appeal has been dismissed by a planning inspector!

Celebrations to mark the centenary of Laurie Lee’s birth have been just been taking place and this news has come as an ideal climax. In the words of Andy Dickinson of the Slad Valley Action Group, it was a “fabulous result” and “gives us real hope to preserve the valley for the future.”