Ours is neither a grand nor luxurious house. But it is exceptional. For over
seven centuries, it has stood on the outskirts of Sudbury, perhaps the
oldest inhabited private dwelling in Europe, set against the unchanged
landscape in which it was built. It inspired the young Gainsborough to play
truant from school in the 1740s with his sketchbook. It is the view depicted
in his “greatest landscape masterpiece”, Cornard Wood, which hangs in the
National Gallery. The painting shows the same track, the same cart wash, the
same trees, spreading out to the same fields featuring real people.

Yet that view is now threatened by a development of 170 houses. Despite
passionate opposition, not just from ourselves but more than 2,000 locals,
English Heritage and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, plans are close
to being approved. The cultural, historic and environmental impact would be
ignored, not to mention the alarming strain on the local infrastructure.

I never imagined to be so taken by it all. The painting. The links to the
past. Nature. Maybe it’s what happens when you grow up. But it happens for a
reason. It is our turn to look after it. And now Philip Larkin’s beguilingly
fogeyish poem Going Going, ticks in my head: “I thought it would last my
time”.

After all, alongside the house, “the shadows, the meadows, the lanes” have
survived the Black Death and the civil war. The Cavaliers walked them. So
have the Georgians, the Victorians and the Edwardians. But can they survive
the meddlings of a Coalition government, cutting through the voting
heartland of David Cameron’s own party?

Of course, it is easy to lampoon the opposition: how can the Farrow and Ball
brigade in their wisteria-clad homes expect to remain untouched? So what if
Gainsborough gambolled around this landscape, viola da gamba in one hand,
sketchbook in the other? So what if an old house stands against the same
backdrop as it did in 1290? So what if there is a link between past and
present here that is written not in words or music, but in grass and mud and
tree?

But “so what” is threatening to become the story of our time. For our own
part, we do not fit a Middle England stereotype and nor do our neighbours.
And after one summer here, after seeing how many children wander the fields,
alongside their dog-walking parents and smooching older siblings, we have
made a preliminary lottery application to set up an arts project so children
might sit in the same spot as Gainsborough, painting what he saw.

For there is perhaps more than a whiff of inverted snobbery in attacks on
opponents of the plans. Everyone I have spoken to in our community from
stable girls at the riding school, to local decorators, teachers and retired
bankers, have all sighed at the “going, going” of it.

On the contrary, what the proposals expose is a frantic absence of imagination
and creativity in designing new, affordable houses that people want to live
in, in places where they want to live, that will enhance their lives and the
environment. We are told that we are running 100,000 houses short of the
250,000 annual target. But joyless, identikit houses in the wrong place are
next to useless.

The house we live in was built from local materials. It is limewashed with
pigs’ blood and whisky to give it its distinct “Suffolk pink” finish; the
roof tiles are from local kilns and clay and have weathered to blend into
the backdrop. The wood is from trees that grew nearby. Meanwhile, like every
owner of a house, we cannot so much as change a door knocker without council
permission. It is not a restriction we resent. But it is ironic that the
same council is now being actively encouraged to slap a concrete housing
estate in its shadows without any effective means of opposition.

As for Gainsborough’s legacy, Cornard Wood was a ground-breaking painting that
showed the countryside belonged to people going about their everyday
business. It remains so. And Larkin’s poem? It was commissioned in 1972 by
the newly formed Department of Environment. And it was, ironically, a Tory
government leading the call then to preserve the countryside.

So supporters of unhindered development may call us “selfish nihilists”, or
they might take a closer look at that painting and the views of our 2,000
neighbours. It belongs to all of us, the children, the dog- walkers, the
joggers, the smoochers, just as it belonged to Gainsborough’s labourers and
cart washers and milkmaids. And if we let it go, alongside those other
fields and lanes under threat, then in Larkin’s words, “England will be
gone”.