Build clinic in orchard (From Cotswold Journal)

Build clinic in orchard

10:54am Thursday 9th July 2009

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A CHIPPING Campden doctor is urging people to support the controversial plan to build a doctor’s surgery on a beautiful orchard on the edge of the town.

Dr Giles Bointon, senior partner at Campden Surgery, spoke out after townsfolk were angered by proposals to build the new surgery and a car park on Wolds End Orchard.

Their anger erupted earlier this year when a bulldozer arrived at the Aston Road orchard, allegedly to build a car park entrance.

In 2006, Cotswold District Council gave the Campden Society planning permission to build on one third of the orchard.

The society, which bought the ancient orchard three years ago, said it had to start the work to prevent the planning permission expiring in August but has no intention of actually building the car park that was proposed to ease town centre parking congestion.

The Campden Society rents the orchard, where trees date back the 17th century, to Chipping Campden School for a peppercorn rent.

The school runs its rural studies course at the site, where pupils harvest fruit trees and keep sheep, pigs and chickens.

Dr Bointon said he and Campden Surgery’s three part-time doctors needed new premises because the number of their patients had risen from 3,300 in 1995 to 4,500 now, rendering their existing 18-year-old, 150-foot-long Back Ends building too small.

He said its car park only has about six spaces and these are all taken by staff, forcing patients to be dropped off or walk there.

There is no room for district nurses, health visitors and community psychiatric nurses.

Dr Bointon said Ashley House, the development company that would build the new surgery, had examined about seven possible sites.

He said: “Wolds End Orchard is their preferred site because it’s the only one close enough to the town and the chemist.”

Dr Bointon added that most of the orchard would remain because the surgery and car park would only cover about a third of it.

He said: “I don’t want to chop down historic apple trees.

“It would be wonderful for patients to look outside and see sheep grazing.”

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