Blenheim Estates and CEG plan to build 600 houses, a primary school and community centre in Long Hanborough between the recently-built Hanborough Park (120 houses) and ancient Pinsley Wood.

Regent Drive will become part of a new main road connecting the A4095 with Lower Road.

The proposed development is much too large, badly located, will have a detrimental effect on the natural environment — and it's questionable whether this rate of housebuilding in West Oxfordshire is needed at all.

Internationally, Blenheim Palace is renowned for its grand architecture and landscape gardens. The birthplace and ancestral home of British wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill, it attracts almost a million visitors a year from all corners of the earth.

Locally, Blenheim presents a duality — shifting in public perception from benevolent neighbour and local employer to corporate behemoth and property developer. The small town of Woodstock and its surrounding villages face an onslaught of successive planning applications for house-building on an unprecedented scale.

Multiple existing petitions show the strength of opposition to Blenheim’s various greenfield development proposals. This petition focuses on Long Hanborough, two miles southwest of the palace, where Blenheim-owned Pye Homes has recently completed construction of 169 houses and received outline planning permission for 150 more.

Seemingly insatiable, Blenheim is now set to present details of plans for a further 600 houses at the east end of the village.

A development of this scale is inappropriate for Long Hanborough, which has already received a disproportionate share of new homes locally. Road and sewerage infrastructure is known to be inadequate. Wildlife in the ancient Pinsley Wood, including deer and the now rare song thrush, will be threatened by years of construction work — and may not return once their habitat is directly adjoined by human habitation. And just a few miles further afield, 4,000 new homes are already earmarked for Kidlington, Begbroke and Yarnton; and more than 2,000 for Eynsham. This rate of growth has never been needed before, and it’s hard to imagine that such a demand exists now.

We call on Blenheim CEO Dominic Hare, Property Director and COO Roger File, Witney MP Robert Courts, and others with the necessary power to ensure that this latest proposal for 600 homes in Long Hanborough is cancelled without delay.