A straw man loses his castle

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It took Bob Fidler two years to build the house of his dreams. He used reclaimed bricks, stones from an old church wall and oak beams hand-carved from trees on his land.

But now the 61-year-old farmer is being told to pull his home down.

In today's Britain, it seems, a man's castle is not his home, at least when it is built on community-controlled land.

Fidler's problem is that his farm is on a greenbelt in Surrey that runs around London, a huge swathe of farmland, fields and forests that is protected by laws dating back to 1935.

Fidler knew that he would never get permission from the local planning authorities to build what amounted to a second home on his land. But he thought he'd found a way to get around the law.

In Britain, if you build and live in a house for four years, it becomes your legal residence with or without planning permission.

"The problem was," Fidler says, that "if the authorities saw it, they would stop me living in it and I had to live there for four years."

So, for four years, until August 2006, he kept his castle hidden behind bales of hay.

Straw man

That wasn't as difficult as it sounds. Fidler happens to be in the straw and hay business so he stacked bales of hay around three sides of his new house and hung a tarpaulin over the fourth.

"If I was going to have to go through the trauma of having to live behind a stack of straw for so many years, I wanted to end up with something special," he said. So he built a castle.

Once finished, he lived hidden away with his wife and young son.

"It was a bit like being in a tent," he recalls fondly. "We had robins and hedgehogs living in the straw, just like a garden."

When his pre-school son said he had been asked to draw his house at school one day, he was kept home "in case he drew a haystack."

As soon as the magic four-year deadline passed, Fidler proudly unveiled his masterpiece, only to be slapped with a demolition order.

The local authorities decided that "the four-year clock only started ticking when the bales of hay and tarpaulin came off."

Fidler's appeal to Britain's department of environment was turned down.

He appealed to the High Court but lost again earlier this month when the court agreed with the planning authorities that the hay was part of the building operation, intended to conceal what was going on.

"Britain is a small island," explains Councillor Michael Miller, head of the local planning authority.

"Every planning authority in the country is looking at the decision on this because, if it isn't upheld and enforced, people will just do what they like within the greenbelt and that unfortunately can't be allowed to happen."

But Fidler refuses to give up. "It's a dream, isn't it? And without a dream you're dead."

His next step is to take his case to the Court of Appeal and perhaps Britain's Supreme Court.

If all else fails he says he is prepared to go to the European Court of Human Rights in the Hague.

So, one way or another, Bob Fidler's home will remain his castle for at least a little longer.