[Stones] New houses for Avebury?

[littlestone]

I had the pleasure of staying for a week in a cottage in Avebury High Street last February. The one thing that really struck me was that there was still a community feel to the village - people would wish you good morning when out walking, mums would bring their children to the school next door and you could hear them playing at the back of the cottage (the children that is not the mums :-) The church clock would chime on the hour, coal would get delivered and you could have a bit of a chat with the neighbours and the postmaster. Now the school has closed and the post office and general store will follow this year.

I suppose you could say that the village started dying, or at least started on its downward path, when Alexander Keiller moved half the villagers out to Avebury Trusloe and demolished many of their houses back in the 1930s. The village, for example, once had a little hotel (the thatched cottage next to the antique shop which I think itself used to be a tea house) and a butcher's and an abattoir at the bottom of the High Street. Now all that has either gone or changed, in fact there are now only four privately owned houses in Avebury.

I might be wrong but building new houses in Avebury will probably not regenerate the village - the infrastructure is no longer there. People who can afford it will move in and, although that is not a bad thing, I fear that it might be the thin end of the wedge with not just a few houses being built on the site of the Bonds Garage but later wherever developers can get their hands on land. The only really safe option is a green zone around Avebury where no further building (with the possible exception of small improvements and extensions) is allowed.
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