27 August 2025
Campaign group Save Newick Village welcomed East Grinstead and Uckfield MP Mims Davies to an information event on Saturday (August 23) at the village green – attended by a bumper crowd of residents keen to object to proposals for a 250 house development on 85-acres of productive farmland on the edge of the historic village.
She listened to villagers’ concerns that the development would increase Newick’s population by 30% − with 700 + car-dependent people in expensive executive homes turning it into a characterless urbanisation and pushing already over-stretched infrastructure into crisis.
Residents’ fear over-development will push over-subscribed health services and school places into crisis, make the congested A272 busier and more hazardous and irreversibly destroy prime farmland, countryside and the rural character of Newick. They fear replacing green fields with tarmac and buildings will further impact an area which regularly floods and that its residents will increase raw sewage discharges into the River Ouse nearby.
Mims was taken to see the proposed site for herself, currently green fields of sweetcorn being grown for animal fodder. She was alarmed at its scale and the potential impact it would have on the adjacent waste water treatment works which in 2023 / 24 dumped raw sewage into the River Ouse for over 500 hours.
She said: “I met with villagers this weekend at the third event highlighting the new significant housing site likely to go to planning committee at LDC shortly.
This is a well organised, positive, and inclusive campaign of clearly concerned community members who are not anti-housing but concerned about significant overdevelopment and impact in Newick by this site, like many communities since the top-down approach and pressures from the new government.
They are contending, like many, with a very significant new site of development on current active and vital agricultural land which is growing crops used by nearby farmers to feed local livestock.
We all recognise the widespread issues and impacts our farmers are under with inheritance tax and other cost pressures, but food security is a deep concern for Newick villagers as well as the lack of infrastructure, pavements , pathways, and suitable road crossing schemes required to connect the new homes to the centre of the village which are unclear beyond the housing. The impact on the river and water supply is also a great concern and villagers feel this site is too dense on crop growing fields to be acceptable and suitable.
I will be sending in my formal response for them voicing my objection on their behalf to the council to appraise. The council needs to find sites in the right place with suitable infrastructure required to support communities and back villagers’ views and this needs to be heard and recognised when this reaches the LDC planning committee.
With brownfield and windfall sites coming forward in the village, a new very large site feels to many locals like a step too far for the village to be able to accommodate and they want the council to listen and take this into account and act accordingly.”
Campaign group Save Newick Village launched in June and has to date, encouraged well over 700 villagers to lodge objections with Lewes District Council.
They say average prices for Brookworth Homes houses start at £700k and will not provide affordable homes for local people. A 4-bed house at nearby Maresfield Heights is being marketed off-plan* for ‘offers in excess of £1.7m’ and Brookworth recently u-turned on a commitment to provide affordable homes at a development in Battle.
With two Lewes District Council planning committee meetings recently cancelled, the group is unsure when a decision will be made on the planning application, but is urging more residents – and others who use the village pubs, shops and other facilities – to go to http://www.savenewickvillage.com to continue adding their objections.
