Shropshire Star

Objections to plans for historic Church Stretton cottage

Plans for an extension to a 17th century cottage in Church Stretton have run into objections from locals.

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nostalgia pic. Church Stretton. nostalgia pic in colour. A watercolour of Pryll Cottage, Burway Road, Church Stretton. From about 1900. The artist is only known by the initials E.A.R. This sent in by Mrs Joyce Davies of Church Stretton in connection with protests about plans in 2020 to extend the cottage. Library code: Church Stretton nostalgia 2020..

A planning application has been lodged with Shropshire Council for a part two-storey extension, and part single-storey extension, at Pryll Cottage in Burway Road. The application seeks to address concerns over a previous application which the council turned down last year on grounds including that the proposed extension was of excessive scale.

The new application has received eight objections, including from the town council.

Mrs Joyce Davies, who lives nearby, said: "It's a lovely cottage going back to the 1700s. I knew the old lady who lived there, Monica Bott, who had probably bought it in the 1960s or 1970s. It was a wattle and daub cottage – up a little staircase she had a piece of glass so you could look through it and see the original wattle and daub.

A watercolour of Pryll Cottage from around 1900.

"It's a two bedroom cottage but the planning application would see it extended into a five-bedroomed dwelling which stretches up the hill going up the Burway Road. All the people around here in Rectory Gardens are very concerned. It's one of the few things left in Church Stretton and it seems as if it's not going to be demolished exactly, but ruined.

"Pryll is an old Marches dialect word meaning a stream of clear running water. The town brook from the Long Mynd does run by the cottage."

Mrs Davies says formal objections lodged with the council – she has not herself made a formal objection – have tended to be on issues such as parking problems and the extension being out of keeping.

"My angle is that I remember the old lady living there and how she loved it. She wrote books about it and did lovely watercolours of her garden. She died in a nursing home about 16 or 17 years ago.

"Does it have to be ruined? Does it have to become a five bedroomed house?

"It's brick, with Snowcem. It's quite olde worlde, not a great beauty but a little house of character."

Pryll Cottage is said to have been a pub called The Besom Inn for a short period around 1905.

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