RICHARD EDEN: Viscount bows to stress over bike tyre recycling plan
Since their sumptuous, three-day wedding in 2022, when 190 guests feasted on Albacore tuna and salt marsh beef, Viscount and Viscountess Newport have been a blur of action.
They have hatched bold plans for the 12,000-acre family estate on the Shropshire-Staffordshire border which Alexander Newport now controls, celebrated the birth of their first child — and still found time to track down auction house treasures and host friends in their ‘ruby-red dining room’ with its splendid cut-glass candelabra.
But, judging by the howls of outrage emerging from their home village of Weston-under-Lizard, Alexander and Eliza Newport may soon hear some innovative, and quite possibly abrasive, suggestions for what precisely they can do with their cut-glass candelabra.
It’s all a result of the Newports’ latest proposal — to convert a disused barn on the edge of the village into a ‘bicycle tyre and inner tube re-purposing facility’.
Alexander and Eliza Newport (pictured) may soon hear some innovative, and quite possibly abrasive, suggestions for what precisely they can do with their cut-glass candelabra
They have hatched bold plans for the 12,000-acre family estate on the Shropshire-Staffordshire border
A proposal for a nuclear re-processing plant could scarcely have generated such disgust. One local, fearful of ‘toxic fumes’ and ‘chemicals/waste leeching into groundwater’ and thence into nearby crops, said that she ‘couldn’t object more strongly’.
Another summarised the plan as ‘absurdly inappropriate’, while a third categorised it as ‘totally unjustified, unreasonable, ill-conceived and ridiculous’.
Others wondered how Alexander, eldest of the Earl of Bradford’s three sons, and Latvian-born Eliza were planning to reconcile the proposal with their commitment — trumpeted on Bradford Estates’ website — to ‘responsible and sustainable practices’.
Even the County Highways roared in with objections, pointing out that the development raises ‘unacceptable safety concerns’, given narrow lanes and junctions and the fact that an ’18ft rigid truck is required to serve the site’.
It seems to have been enough to throw Alexander, 43, and his wife, into reverse. ‘We understand that the proposed recycling use is not preferred by the local residents,’ Eliza, 33, assures the local parish council, adding: ‘we have withdrawn our planning application’.
