Wiltshire Council's Northern Area Planning Committee has granted outline permission for 135 homes on farmland north of Royal Wootton Bassett, off Swindon Road. The scheme, from developer Gleeson Land, includes 54 affordable homes, 81 open market properties, a new access road, play areas and drainage infrastructure, and was approved on 14 October.
Objectors, including parish councils and residents, raised concerns about urban sprawl, traffic, strained infrastructure and the development's closeness to Post Mill, a medieval windmill. Officers said they would mitigate the impact with a 50 metre buffer zone. The approval follows last year's sign off of 410 homes behind Sally Pussey's Inn, which prompted warnings that Royal Wootton Bassett could end up physically touching Swindon somewhere around the M4 junction.
That buffer zone is, by current reckoning, the single largest remaining piece of open countryside separating the two settlements, and is understood to be under consideration for its own neighbourhood plan. Surveyors have reportedly started measuring the gap in car lengths rather than miles, for ease of panic.
Some residents are said to be preparing contingency plans in the event the two towns formally become one, including a working title, a shared coat of arms, and an argument over whether the new entity keeps the word Royal. Nobody has yet proposed keeping the word Bassett, out of what officials called sensitivity.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she remembered when the distance between Swindon and Wootton Bassett was a proper afternoon's drive with a flask, not something you could accidentally step over while putting your bins out. 'Ron always said a town needs a decent run up to it, like a long jump. Now you'd barely get your foot off the ground before you're in someone's new cul de sac.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the merger fears had given him a new way of describing Tench Paper Solutions' recent expansion into the unit next door, which the landlord insists is a separate business despite sharing a kettle, a fire exit and, as of last week, Julie. 'People said it would never merge. Then one day you look up and it's one big open plan reality and nobody remembers signing anything.'
The windmill's 50 metre buffer zone, now the last officially protected stretch of nothing between the two towns, was unavailable for comment, on account of being a buffer zone.