Skerningham is Darlington’s loveliest stretch of accessible countryside but it is destined to become a housing estate.

The Tees Valley Mayor, some of his business associates and Darlington Council have determined that it will be scattered with at least 3,700 large houses in clusters that break up its wildlife-rich fields, meadows and walkways as well as driving a road across its woodland.

Pllanning applications for the first 1,450 houses are imminent. An application is already before the council to drive a construction access road through from Bishopton Lane to Barmpton Lane, crossing the Skerne at the site where trees and shrubs were cleared early this year in what the council said was just “routine land maintenance” work.

The whole “garden village” covers 1,300 acres of Skerningham, once described by the very same council as “the jewel in the crown” of the borough’s rural hinterland. That’s an area best visualised as 14 duplicates of Darlington’s South Park all stuck together.

Skerningham Woodland Action Group has led the campaign against the scheme for years. The announcement, in 2017, came as a surprise as, two years earlier, Darlington Council had ruled that Skerningham was unfit for housing. The mechanics of that U-turn are still a mystery.

SWAG’s band of followers is climbing steadily towards 2,000. Why are we all against the plan? Because it will result in the wrong houses being built in the wrong place.

We will continue the fight on swagdarlington.com but we need your help. For starters, you could put in an objection to that access road; it's called a “haul road” by planners. We have already done so on the grounds that it puts the cart before the horse: what’s the point of getting the haul road approved before you've got official approval for the houses? Surely, work isn’t going to begin without official planning approval? Even if Darlington Council needs the extra Council Tax from all those big homes.

If you want to object to any aspect of the current planning applications connected to the garden village scheme, go to Darlington Council’s website, then to the “planning” section and do a search for Skerningham. Lots of people have. Click here.

It would help, too, if you let your local councillor know how you feel about the “garden village”. You can find him or her on the council website too. Be warned: Labour councillors are being told to support the scheme.

Best of all, though, is to sign Lottie’s petition. She’s a ten-year-old with more gumption than the whole of Darlington Council, the Tees Valley Mayor and the developers put together. And we’ll support her to the hilt!

Lottie, age ten, with her petition to save Skerningham

This is why they are the wrong houses and in the wrong place

Darlington desperately needs “affordable” homes, instead we are awash with houses boasting three, four and more bedrooms. The council has currently approved more than three times the Government-decreed number of such large, expensive houses. Yet only around 150 small, cheap homes, close to jobs, schools, doctors, public transport and other amenities are being built here annually.
The Government recently issued a housing policy statement saying it “respects the need to prioritise the avoidance of harm to wildlife”. Skerningham’s deer, foxes, hares, badgers, otters, skylarks, fieldfares, owls etc (yes, including newts and bats) will inevitably be harmed by the destruction of their habitat. The developers’ own submissions say: “All existing habitats are expected to be lost” and “No habitat enhancement is proposed for the existing site habitats…”
Trees and hedges, some rare, will be scythed. A road is to bisect the woods, shattering the old, established trackways of wildlife, displacing owls and other tree-dwellers. Some of the trees themselves are rare, like the black poplars which guard a woodland burial site within which no one knows exactly where human remains may lie.
The local waterworks, appropriately named Stressholme, is already just a couple of flushes away from exceeding its sewage capacity, putting the River Skerne, its otters, fish and other wildlife at risk, not to mention the health and sense-of-smell of the new human residents.
Many other causes for alarm include the shortage of buses and the effect of thousands of extra cars on already-crowded nearby roads; acres and acres of concrete on the land surface causing the river to flood downstream; possible noxious fumes escaping from a nearby landfill and more.