The degrowth revolution might begin in Cheddington

It’s hard to put into words just how far away we are from a degrowth-informed housing in my village. Cheddington is a village of 2,000 odd in ‘leafy Buckinghamshire’, Orwell would’ve adored its “green and pleasent-ness”, occasionally inspiring utopic moods on radiant afternoons. Yet it’s character hardly inspires a big re-jig of society, there’s no more poignant image of this than the ridiculous housing estates springing up all over rural Britain.

A man from Galicia once told me that you have to look to your local ancestors for inspiration and transgenerational solidarity when it comes to thinking about how we can build a better society. He looks to the Galician anarchist partisans from the 30s, I look out my window and see Mentmore Towers, one of many old home bases for the Rothschild family. I see colonial wealth stuffing the land in the countless manor homes dotted around, I see the PM’s countryside gaff, I see the wealth extracted from the big corps of the capital stuffed into the property of the villages, but I digress. 

Here we’re discussing housing not the Rothschilds, but the key players in my village’s housing story are really the shit sequel to the Rothschild empire. Charles Church, “a British upmarket housebuilding company”, has recently built a 100-home estate in the village. It is a subsidiary of Persimmon PLC, a FTSE 100 company with the flattering accolade of having the UK’s “most generous bonus scheme in history”, giving out £800m in bonuses to 150 of its biggest wigs in 2016 and an undoubtedly deserved £128m bonus to the Lucifer Morningstar, the CEO. It goes without saying, but Persimmon’s properties have regularly turned out to be crap, crap enough to warrant a Channel 4 Dispatch documentary, which is as good as being branded with “we’re up to something well shady”.  

Charles Church shares the local market with other benevolent enterprises, namely Taylor Wimpey, who were one of the 2% of respondents to reject a government consultation proposing reducing emissions of new-builds by 80% by 2025, and W.E. Black, who decided rather than waiting for planning permission to bulldoze a historic orchard behind our house, would just set it all on fire and bulldoze it in one morning before the council arrive and take the fine, very nice. 

Passing through Cheddington, it doesn’t exude emotive symbolism of political struggles in the way you’d get walking down