I was out surveying at the weekend, starting at Thorpe-le-Soken railway station and aiming to finish at Little Clacton’s village carnival collecting many of the remaining missing house numbers to complete Little Clacton parishes addressing. As part of this I walked down Batemans Lane with the intention of taking Lotts Road, heading back up Talbot Road to do Homing Road and Thorrington Road before heading along Brookfield Road to Elm Road. Note the named tracks get their names from OS OpenData; there are no on the ground signs.

However, Lotts Road turned out to be a small path through nettles initially. I could tell from OS OpenData StreetView that it should be one side or the other of the house shown, but I missed it and ended up walking into Ideal Nurseries, which seems to be some greenhouses that have seen better days surrounded by old vehicles in a similar state to the greenhouses. And a brand new house which looks like it is about to be completed. If you look on Bing it is under construction, or if you zoom in it is just a cleared bit of orchard.

When I got home I did a bit of investigation. I couldn’t find any planning application for it on the council website which concerned me a bit. Should I report it, or not? So before deciding I took another look this morning and happily tracked down the application - why I missed it on Saturday was because I was looking for something recent. The permission had originally been granted in 1990, and the linked application for resiting (due to powerlines) was made and granted in 1991 - the “other” document on the above link contains correspondence checking that marking out the corners of the property and digging a trench for the front foundation counted as commencement work under the terms of the original permission and it seems that was all that was done until probably a year or so ago (depending how new Bing’s imagery is…)

Having said all that I do think I’ve found a building on Bing which should have been removed by 1997. I figure I’ve probably missed something there too. Or the council did.

Edit: It was me. In the refusal of the 1996 application there is correspondence which says it is “being used wholly and solely as incidental to the enjoyment of the dwelling house” - so not as a separate property and can remain (see “Other” pages 2 and 3).

Edit 2: Rereading the above, “aiming to finish” in the first sentence was meant to be followed by the bit about how I got sidetracked by a pub