A BORDON couple are fighting to stop woodland and open green spaces from being lost to the Bordon new town development.

Fiona and Peter Davey live in a house they bought from the Army, in a quiet road in the Pinewood area, and from their front windows they can see the trees they, with other residents, saved in the past.

In their battle to save these trees, at their nearby playground, from being felled, their children climbed on the lower branches and sat on the roots.

Now they fear the town redevelopment - which will see up to 3,350 homes built over the next 20 years - will threaten the peace of their road because of the bypass being built half a mile from their home.

They are also concerned about the new secondary school - which will be built at Budds Lane Recreation Ground on the former garrison playing field - and housing to be built near it.

Recently, when on their daily walk with their dog Troy through the woodland around their house, the couple noticed “a lot of trees being felled”. They asked the Whitehill and Bordon Regeneration Company, which is developing Prince Philip Barracks to provide a new town centre and housing, what was happening.

The explanation they got, they said, was that the tree clearing was needed to make way for surveyors to work in the area.

“However, the area being cleared is two and three metres wide - surely it doesn’t have to be that wide just for a surveyor to work,” Mrs Davey said.

The couple fear the Green Loop, of footpaths and cyclepaths around the town, is being built at the expense of woodland.

“How can they call it the new Green Town when they seem to be getting rid of woodland and open space?” Mr Davey asked. “We have already lost two football fields.”

The effect of the tree felling, they said, meant there were now gaps in the woodland which used to act as a buffer against noise.

“We can hear the building work going on in Station Road and soon we will have the traffic going through on the new relief road,” said Mr Davey.

What the Daveys find really frustrating is, they said: “No one tells us when this work is going to take place.

“Recently, when walking our dog along our usual footpaths, I have found ‘closed’ signs on them.

“And recently they closed the path leading through the woods to Budds Lane, which means mums who use it to take their children to school have had to walk the long way round.

“There is no warning of when felling or other work is to take place and suddenly you find that places, where you walk regularly, have been closed off,” Mrs Davey said.

“In one area I estimate 100 young trees have gone.”

Mr Davey said they also had the problem of not knowing who owns what land because some was marked as owned by the Ministry of Defence, some by East Hampshire District Council and some by the developers.

“The Budds Lane sports ground, which I think is still owned by the Ministry of Defence, has been a disgrace this summer,” said Mrs Davey.

“The grass hasn’t been cut and you have difficulty walking through it.”

Mrs Davey said she had sent dozens of emails to the Whitehill and Bordon Regeneration Company which, as a joint venture between Dorchester Regeneration and Taylor Wimpey UK, is based in Bordon. In these, she listed her complaints and asked for answers.

Mrs Davey, who is often asked by her neighbours what is happening with the trees and relief road, added: “I feel I am carrying the weight of other residents on my shoulders.”

Although, Mrs Davey said, they had received reassurances from the developer that no mature trees would be felled, she was worried that some of the lovely oaks around them could go.

She said: “When the council threatened, a few years ago, to take down the trees in our local play area, which is just over the back of the houses opposite, my boys climbed up into the lower branches and we sat on the roots to stop them from being felled. It worked and the trees are still there.

“I am so concerned that we will lose our beautiful trees that I am planting acorns and conquers and when they are big enough I will replant them so future generations will be able to see how beautiful they are.”

The Daveys said there were no warnings of when developers were going to close a footpath or start felling.

“It is not just us but our neighbours too who want to know what is happening,” Mr Davey said.

For example, he cited the garrison church of St George’s. “We have seen no planning application for it and at present it is being used as a site office.”

Awareness of Bordon changing prompted the Daveys to record the transformation of the town from being a military to a civilian one.

“I started with the fabulous Farewell to the Garrison (event), but in all fairness I feel I should go back even further than that,” Mrs Davey said. “My husband’s association with Bordon began with his basic training way back in 1972 when he joined the REME.”

Bristol-born Mr Davey said: “I did my basic training in Bordon in one of the Army huts. There were 24 soldiers to a hut and it was very basic.”

Also there was not much for the young soldiers to do in the town and Bordon did not even have a pub at that time, he recalled.

“Because Queen Victoria didn’t want to hear of any of her Army being drunk, she wouldn’t allow a pub to be built in the town,” he said.

A few years later, it was on another Army base - in Chattenden in Kent - that he met Fiona, who came from the Isle of Wight and was serving in the Women’s Royal Army Corps. They married in 1979 and that was the end of Mrs Davey’s Army career. “You weren’t allowed to be a serving officer and married,” she said.

The couple have two sons, Paul and Matthew, and Mrs Davey ran a Cubs group in Bordon. Like so many Army wives she had to cope for much of the time on her own while her husband served as a mechanical engineer in Northern Island, Germany, Cyprus and with the United Nations forces and the Blues and Royals in Windsor. In 1988 they moved to Bordon and now proudly fly a Union flag over the front door. When Peter retired after 22 years of service in the Army, he was awarded the Long Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal.

After moving into their home, they watched as Pinewood village was built.

“The old Empire site and the rugby club both became sites for new housing,” Mrs Davey said. “I have lived here continuously since that time. Never again will the area look like this as this change (the town redevelopment) will make everything different. To this end, my husband has set about taking photographs of both the flattening of the area and the subsequent rebuilding. This has included, on two separate Sunday afternoons, a walk up to where the road layout is being changed (on the A325 near the former Louisburg Barracks),” said Mrs Davey. “It means that we were able to record the progression of the building of the road. I kept clippings from the different papers and the pictures from both our cameras as I am hopefully going to scrap book them in due course.

“I hope maybe somebody somewhere down the line will be able to look back on that period in time.”

Sadly, the couple are disillusioned with the promises of the Green Town plan, which will see Whitehill and Bordon’s population double to more than 32,000, according to estimates.

Mr Davey said: “There are very few towns in the country the size Bordon is going to become that don’t have a railway so why would industry or businesses move into here?

“Also, all those houses are coming but where is the infrastructure - we don’t have a hospital now and this new health hub isn’t offering what we had the Chase.”

They feel Bordon has become too big and the old friendly atmosphere of the garrison town, “where we all helped each other”, has gone. They would like to move - their dream is to find a house in Cornwall - because “Bordon not longer feels like home”.

In the meantime, they are continuing their fight to be given information on each step of the development rather than finding, as they walk, “a path has been closed or more trees felled”.

At the time of going to press, they planned to meet representatives from the Regeneration Company this week to discuss their worries.