THE new owners of Northfield play area in Winsley have been offered £17,500 by the local parish council for land used by village children as a football pitch for the past 50 years.

The offer is way below the asking price of £75,000 wanted by BK Land and Estates Ltd, a Maidenhead-based property and land developer.

BK Land and Estates bought the land at a public auction in London on March 10 last year for £66,500 - way above the guide price of £7,500.

Its directors, Murali Bandaru and Prabhakar Bandaru suggested that residents should each contribute £82.78 a head to fund their ‘exclusive’ offer to sell the play area to the local community for £75,000.

Parish Council chairman Ed Gilby said that since the auction they had “worked hard” to add to the protections already in place to make the land valueless to anyone other than the Winsley community.

This has included registering Northfield play area as an Asset of Community Value, meaning that it cannot be offered to anyone else for six months to give the local community a chance to raise the funds to buy it.

Mr Gilby said: “With the help of a grant offered by the Bradford on Avon Area Board, the parish council made an offer in January 2022 of £17,500. No response from the owners was received.”

The parish council has also applied to Wiltshire Council to register the land as a Town and Village Green. The new owners have objected to this application through their legal advisers

Mr Gilby added: “The parish council have responded to these objections. We will continue to work with the best interests of the community at the forefront of our thinking.”

Wiltshire ward councillor Johnny Kidney said: “Since the sale was announced, Winsley Parish Council and I have been working flat out to explore every possible route to secure the future of this land for the community.

“Discussions, I have had with senior planners at Wiltshire Council confirm that the land benefits from numerous planning protections which would make it extremely difficult for anyone to ever develop the land.”

These include its location within the West Wiltshire Green Belt, being outside the settlement boundary of Winsley and within a Special Landscape Area.

“In addition to these protections, there is of course the clearly demonstrable continuous use of the land by generations of Winsley's children over a period of 50 years and ongoing maintenance by the Parish Council,” Cllr Kidney added.