THE audacity of the ‘Royaldown Garden Village’ scheme is breath taking. A 5,000-home new town would be built on farmland between Oliver’s Battery and Hursley.

To give some idea of the size, Barton Farm/Kings Barton is ‘only’ 2,000 homes. Decades of careful town planning that has preserved Winchester as essentially a cathedral city would be wrecked in an orgy of house-building and huge profits for the landowner and developer.

A spokesman for the developer told the Chronicle the scheme will “demonstrate that this is a community scheme for the changing way in which people will want to live in the future.” The glossy brochure talks about country parks, park and ride, solar farms.

Dress it up how you like but it is putting lipstick on a pig.

The Chronicle doesn’t think that anyone in Winchester would want to live in a city where this one development would increase its population of some 40,000 by around 33 per cent.

This is a truly appalling proposal and the quicker this pig is taken to the slaughterhouse the better.