Losing the character of the area - Remember why you like living here?

In many ways, we’re very lucky here. Leighton Buzzard is still, just about, a market town. It’s still reasonably compact and has some unexpectedly quaint and pretty corners. It has an attractive High Street and a parish church that it is rightly proud of. And outside of Leighton-Linslade, there are the surrounding villages, each with its own character and strong sense of identity.

We’re surrounded by a variety of countryside - farmland, woodland and wetland - and we have the canal, the river and Tiddenfoot water park. The town is still small enough to give a sense of the open space that surrounds it, no matter where you are.

All of this could disappear if further mass housing development is allowed. The current Eastern Leighton-Linslade Partnership proposal would not only tarmac over large swathes of farmland from the current eastern boundary of Leighton Buzzard, but it would effectively graft Eggington onto the side of a new, expanded town and completely overwhelm the tranquil hamlet of Clipstone.

Heath & Reach would find the new expanded town pushing at its boundaries, making the assimilation of the village a strong probability for later developments. The fate of Hockliffe would be similar.

The new, expanded super-Leighton Buzzard will eventually swallow the surrounding settlements. It will become a multi-centre mini-conurbation, complete with suburbs and district centres. Economic and commercial activity will be leached out of the town centre at an even faster rate than at present, accelerating its decline.

The single-centre market town that we know will have gone forever. The villages will just become districts within a morass of identikit modern development. Leighton Buzzard could eventually stretch from the Bucks border to the A5, along the A505 to Stanbridge and Tilsworth, and beyond the A505 towards Billington.

If we wanted to live in an area like that, then we would have gone to Milton Keynes or Stevenage or Hemel Hempstead. But we don’t. We live here.