Property Special: Agricultural landKilling fields

So just what was that Matt Crawford up to in Midsummer Meadow?

For the benefit of the one or two of you who are not Archers fans, a villain of a property developer straight out of central casting (sleazy accent, lap-dancing clubber) was about to buy some meadow land from the saintly David and Ruth (Archer, natch), ostensibly for the use of his lady wife’s horses.

It was soon suspected that Crawford was, while offering to pay agricultural prices, hoping to employ a planning loophole and get permission for some country house designed by a fashionable architect with the right connections. When the upright David Archer suggested a clause giving him a share of any windfall development game, the nasty developer made an excuse and backed off. But this correspondent has her suspicions that Mr Crawford may have been even more devious, planning to do something that is the 2003 answer to the timeshare sales of the 1990s.

In the wake of the farming crisis that culminated in the foot-and-mouth disaster, agricultural land values plummeted and some farmers, traditionally land hoarders, became desperate enough to sell. Their hardship created a new enterprise: middlemen companies were set up, buying acreage and selling tiny plots to individual buyers at up to 20 times their real value. This trade in what is often green belt on the fringes of existing villages but with no development value has rocketed in the past five years, making huge profits for the traders.

One company alone, Gladwish Land Sales of Horsham, boasts that its sales have multiplied fiftyfold, from £92,000 in 1995/6 to £4,786,000 in 2001/2. The number of buyers, it claims, has risen from 535 to 14,688. One plot on offer on the Gladwish website is one twentieth of an acre near the pretty village of Ticehurst, East Sussex.