Up in the wood

THERE ARE a lot of parks these days, residential and holiday, that claim environmental credentials such as David Bellamy awards. However, not many can claim to be set amid protected woodland.

Bluelieghs Park is something of a curiosity, therefore – and in more ways than one. Suffolk is not known for its hills, but Bluelieghs sits on one of them. And it owes its existence to the need for land down below in the village of Great Blakenham.

Back in the early 1960s, the Prentice family, who owned some land in the village, were persuaded to swap it for the woodland site on the hill – along with planning permission for a mobile home park with a residential licence.

Last year Bluelieghs, by now very run down and overgrown, was bought by Wyldecrest Properties, a company with five other parks in Essex, Surrey and Bedfordshire.

Wyldecrest has set about redeveloping the park, installing new homes with block-paved drives, landscaping the plots, and attracting new residents. There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s clear even before the first phase of the work is complete, that the result will be a vast improvement.

The area
Great Blakenham is a sizeable village a few miles from Ipswich – though its near neighbour Claydon, a mile away just across the railway line, is actually the place offering shops and other local services.

Ipswich itself has the major local facilities for shopping and entertainment, and there are buses from the end of the road that leads to Bluelieghs. It isn’t known as one of the country’s more interesting cities, though, suffering by comparison to its Norfolk counterpart, Norwich.

But not far up the nearby A14 from Great Blakenham is Stowmarket, and a few miles further is the small but lovely cathedral city of Bury St Edmunds.


Happy accident
The man with the main responsibility for keeping the residents happy is manager Kim Kempster. His arrival at the park was something of an accident, though. Having been an apprentice to his father, he had spent 37 years in the general building trade, interspersed with about 14 years as a holiday relief HGV driver on the continent, and then a few more years working in the haulage company’s office, until the business folded.

“Bill Prentice was a friend of the owner of the company,” he recalls, “and used to come into the office regularly, so I got to know him reasonably well. Then one of the people who owned the land the haulage company had rented, and who I also knew well, phoned me up and said, ‘I hear you’re looking for a house. There’s one going on a mobile home park with a job attached, manager and maintenance.’ He gave me the number, I phoned up and it turned out to be Bill Prentice.

“So, here I am, managing the park. And I’m quite happy. I do enjoy it. It’s quite a challenge. I’ve been fitting a garage door today, I do the electrics, plumbing, pipework, sewage, and anything else if I have to, like block paving and kerbing. I qualified as an electrician earlier this year, and I’ve been pushing to do a CORGI course, too.”
Kim, who hails from Park Royal in north-west London, but has been a Suffolk man for 25 years, moved to the park in October 2003. It was February the following year that Bill Prentice sold it to Wyldecrest Properties.

“When Wyldcrest took over there wasn’t an immediate change, we gave the residents three or four months to try to get used to the idea of things changing – but even now there are a few people who don’t like the work we’re doing.

“We’ve got six and a half acres of usable land here, and about two and a half acres of woodland, which is protected woodland, where all the trees have preservation orders. When the Prentices swapped the land for the space in the village, they were allowed to develop a mobile home park with some residential plots, but on the condition they didn’t do anything to the perimeter of trees, so the homes couldn’t be seen from the village.

“In fact, when we started doing the refurbishments the residents were almost literally living in a forest here, it was so overgrown and untidy.”

Phase one of the work should be completed by Christmas, as far as the ground works are concerned. “Every slab is being renewed,” Kim says. “We’re rebuilding the manholes and the drains, and we’re replacing the electrics and the water supply to each slab, and obviously new homes are being put on. And as this is being done everything is being landscaped, the road and kerbing is completely new – there was just tar and chippings and undergrowth before.

“There’s 28 homes on here at the moment, and we have a licence for 73. Prices for new homes start from about £85,000, and we’ve done about 24 sales in the last five weeks.”

Most of the new homes will be doubles, but there will a few singles where there is less room. There’s also an L-shaped plot on a sweeping corner, which will work out as the equivalent of a 35x20. “It’s a Homeseeker Langdale Plus and it will have French doors in the little cut-out area,” says Kim, “and I’ll be putting a decking terrace on the front.
“We’ve even got a T-shaped plot we are waiting for a deposit on. It won’t be a full-sized home, but the chap fell in love with the position and likes the idea of having a conservatory with the ridge going all the way into the living room, which will be also be full of light.”

Kim says that the aim is for a community of 45-plus owners, with no resident children, and he believes the park is beginning to really benefit from Wyldecrest’s refurbishment work. “You know what park home communities are like,” he says. “Everybody is prepared to help everybody else. If they want to be private they can be, but if there’s somebody in need, they’ll help them. You try that on a housing estate.

“When I first came here it was a really nice atmosphere, then it fell off a little, but over the last six to nine months we’re beginning to get that back. Now we’re filling in the gaps, people are really coming together again.”

Bluelieghs Park

Chalk Hill, Great Blakenham, Ipswich IP6 0ND Tel: 01473 830409 Email: [email protected] Website: www.wyldecrestparks.com

Back to "Travel" Category