Jess Battison
Residents are seeking revenge on their neighbour who built a massive home gym.
Paul Willis and Emma Woodley built the feature on their drive, taking up one of their two parking spaces.
The couple bought the £440,000 house in Basingstoke, Hampshire, last year and this planning nightmare began not too long after as neighbours began kicking off.
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They apparently weren’t happy as the home gym would mean one of the couple’s cars would have to be parked out on the street.
A complaint was made to the council after building on the gym (thought to be worth tens of thousands) began and the couple were then told to put in a retroactive planning application.
And neighbours were quick to object to it as they protested against it sitting there.
Local Olivia Lucas said in a letter: "As a resident... we already have parking issues with either cars parking fully on the road and other users being unable to get past, or parking on the pavements and pedestrians routinely putting themselves, children and dogs in danger having to walk out from a blind spot behind one of these cars."
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She claimed she had ‘witnessed the danger’ caused by the building and the clients coming to use it.
However, Woodley says she and Willis park the second car they own in unallocated spaces nearby.
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"We didn't use both of those spaces prior to the building being built anyway, just because of the constant need to keep pulling out into a road which we didn't have good visibility to see, causing more of a hindrance to pedestrians and drivers," she explained.
"There's a bend to the road and a hill, so we have to be on the road to get safe visibility about whether it's safe to move out or not."
The neighbours seem to be winning at this point though, as the couple has been ordered to remove the gym and reinstate the parking area within six months.
Woodley says this is ‘ludicrous’ and after Willis had researched planning rules, they believed they were allowed to build the single-storey gym without needing permission.
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He runs a personal training business and is set to lose out on income if the building was knocked down.
The couple say they hadn’t used both of the spaces prior to building the gym anyway due to the lack of visibility ‘causing more of a hindrance to pedestrians and drivers’ and that they ask clients to park in unallocated spaces nearby or walk.
Woodley added that they’re planning on being at the home until they retire but the loss of income would mean potentially having to sell it.
"We're looking at alternative options of whether there's anything we can do," she said.
She continued to claim: "There was no mention anywhere about the council rules around not changing the use of a parking space.
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"It's clearly evident when we walk around the estate, we have got people that have put sheds on their parking spaces.
"Even caravans - what's the difference between us using it for a caravan?”
During the planning meeting, seven councillors voted for the refusal of the application, one voted against and one abstained.
Councillor Paul Miller said that parking policies are not usually set aside when planning applications are being considered and added that ‘parking is a national problem’.
"Another car unable to park at a property is another car that's going to be somewhere else," he said.
Councillor Karen Watts added: "I don't know if there is something to consider here, it could set a precedent that other people could do the same in the area and there would be no other parking spaces."
Woodley said the couple ‘aren't parking on the road, people do park on the road, but they aren't from our house’.
She claimed: "The planning officer parked on the road outside when she came to visit and do the inspection, even though the unallocated space opposite was free."
Councillor Paul Gaskell asked planning officers whether another parking space could be made with the land the couple own.
It was said it would be Woodley and Willis’ responsibility as to whether this could be done.