From D-Day hut to dream home
AUSTIN KING was just 12 years old when the allies launched the 1944 D-Day operation from Greenham Common airbase just over the road from the farm cottage where he grew up.
American forces soon made the area home as the Cold War followed, but after Austin’s farmhand father was killed by a bull, he and his mother were evicted, so they moved into a disused Nissen hut in a field just over the road from the airbase’s main gates. More than a dozen of the corrugated iron huts had been converted into chalets to combat the local post-war housing shortage, and Austin recalls: “They were basic, but we were grateful for anything.”
In 1952, Basingstoke Rural District Council decided to flatten the huts and build 95 new family homes, and the Bishops Green community was formed. Six years after the council housing transfer in 1995, Sentinel Housing Association began working on a major regeneration project with the residents, and in early 2008, the first 45 of 148 new homes completed.
"It's lovely"
Austin, now 77, moved into the first one – a two-bedroom end-terrace in Beech Road – and was pleased to discover that the £89 a week rent was much lower than the £112 a week he had paid for the three bedroom house where he’d lived alone since his mother died.
“This is like a palace,” the ex-head groundsman of Newbury Racecourse says, “it was very strange watching them go up so quick. When I knew which one I was getting, I was very happy. The garden’s easy to manage. It’s lovely.”
The £20m project will complete by 2010, and is funded with £4.2m Housing Corporation grant, a £4.5m land sale to developer Hill Partnerships, and the balance from Sentinel.
Austin is now determined to get back some of the community spirit he remembers in Bishops Green as a young man, and is now chairman of the village community association.
