A new Village Green! What does that mean?

Stoke Lodge Playing Field is the UK’s newest Village Green. Registration is a very significant event, crowning years of commitment by our community to safeguarding open public access to this much-loved and historic parkland. Registration means it will be safe from development for ever.  

There is no national database of registered greens, although the Open Spaces Society estimates that there are around 3650 of them in England and about 220 in Wales, covering about 8150 and 620 acres respectively. From those figures you can see that the average size is just 2-3 acres, although some are huge and some are tiny (like the little green island on Bramble Drive in BS9 which is 0.01 of an acre). They take many different forms, including a working quayside in Essex (despite the lack of any ‘green’ at all), and the area around the war memorial in Westbury-on-Trym. An elongated stretch of the Novers Common Village Green provides important additional protection to an ancient hedgerow along Novers Hill.

Many of the UK’s larger village greens were created in the 1960s and 70s following changes in legislation, and it’s fairly rare these days for a new village green of this size (around 22+ acres) to be created, although it does happen – in late 2022 North Somerset Council voluntarily registered a former golf course on the coast in Portishead, to save it from development. At 23 acres, Frampton-on-Severn has a slightly larger registered green than Stoke Lodge but this has several roads running through it. Closer to home, it might come as a surprise that 100+ acre partly-wooded Kingweston Down is a village green rather than common land or parkland. But in terms of more ‘traditional’ village greens, Stoke Lodge ranks among the largest undivided greens in the South West, as well as being the newest. It has certainly been one of the hardest fought-for!

The rollercoaster journey to have Stoke Lodge registered began with an application made in March 2011. Over the subsequent 12 years the journey has included a public inquiry, a judicial review, two further applications and finally a decision by Bristol City Council’s Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee on 28 June 2023, that the legal test for registration was met at Stoke Lodge in the years before the fence went up.

Is this finally the end of the road? Well, registration makes any further application for judicial review pointless, because the fence will have to come down (see below) and judicial review only looks at the process and whether a decision was properly made. If Cotham School went down this road then, even if they were successful in court, the decision would just come back to the Committee to be taken again – but the fence would no longer be there anyway. Only a court can now amend the register entry, if it considers it to be incorrect and deems it just to rectify the register. Any such court application would be expensive, risky and hard for Cotham School to justify making, since TVG status makes no difference to its ability to continue to use the land for PE (in the same way that it has done since 2000).

The recording of Stoke Lodge as Village Green 29 in the Council’s official register is significant because it triggers the application of legal protections for the land. TVG status protects both informal community use and sports use by Cotham School and local clubs in the way that it has existed for decades. However, under the Inclosure Act 1857 it is a criminal offence to interrupt the use or enjoyment of a village green as a place for exercise and recreation, and under the Commons Act 1876 any enclosure of a village green, or any erection on it or disturbance or interference with the soil of the green which is made otherwise than with a view to the better enjoyment of such town or village green, is a public nuisance. These matters can be pursued by public or private prosecution.

This is why the fence erected by Cotham School in early 2019 (in full knowledge that TVG applications were in process) must now be removed. We were pleased that Cotham announced on 11 August that the pedestrian gates around the field will now be permanently unlocked, 24/7 – but more needs to be done. Ongoing use and enjoyment of the green is interrupted by over 450 fence panels and posts, and this is more than an academic point since the pedestrian gates have never been access-friendly for users with mobility issues, and have never been sufficient in number or placed in the right locations. And if you’re stuck in the nettles and brambles on the narrow perimeter outside the fence, your enjoyment of the rest of the green is definitely interrupted by the fence panels barring your way! Physically as well as visually, the fence is detrimental to the use and enjoyment of this historic parkland.

We are so proud of the way our community came together to protect Stoke Lodge. It took hundreds of hours of work, it took people giving their time, their skills and their money to support the effort – in fact, it took a village to gain our Village Green. We’re so grateful to everyone who supported the campaign and encouraged us to keep going even when significant obstacles were repeatedly put in our way.

We look forward to the swift removal of the fence and to replacement signs that no longer claim to prohibit access or to set additional restrictions on ‘permitted’ use, but instead welcome the school, clubs and the public to the UK’s newest Village Green!