The housing crisis needs solving but in Kent protesters fear for their way of life
The copper-coloured afternoon light turns a deep blue as it streams through the stained-glass windows of All Saints’ church in Tudeley, near Tonbridge, Kent. Visitors come from all over the world to see these colours falling to the floor because All Saints’ is the only church in the world where all the windows are by the modernist artist Marc Chagall. But those heavy, aquatic blues sliced through by white figures could soon shine a little less if a new nearby “garden village” – a mile-long estate of 6,500 houses – gets the go-ahead.
“I’m devastated. I’m appalled,” says campaigner Dave Lovell as he stands outside the church door and looks across the unspoilt countryside where the Tunbridge Wells garden village is proposed. “It’s a beautiful part of the countryside and to lose this historic landscape is a tragedy.”
