Latest news with #GreatMissenden
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Magical summer of storytelling at Roald Dahl Museum
A magical summer of storytelling and creativity awaits fans of a beloved literary classic. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden is celebrating all things Matilda with a packed programme of activities inspired by the iconic character during the school holidays from July 24 to August 31. The Magical Matilda Summer will run Tuesdays to Sundays throughout the break, inviting families to explore the world of Matilda Wormwood and her adventures at Crunchem Hall. Steve Gardam, director at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, said: "We have some great activities lined up for visitors this summer with lots of hands-on fun. "Our Miss Honey's Magical Garden activity is a chance for little ones to recreate the garden surrounding Miss Honey's cottage, set deep in the woods. "Matilda thought it looked like something out of a fairytale and we're inviting our younger guests to make a miniature version. "And Mr Wormwood's Junkyard Cars is a workshop where every visitor will be given a set of wheels and axles to build their own junk car that wouldn't look out of place on Mr Wormwood's forecourt." Other workshops will include science experiments, clay character modelling, and miniature garden design. There will also be daily storytelling, a themed museum trail, and a craft room where children can decorate a book cover to add to the wall. Special events include a creative writing workshop on Thursday, August 7, led by Wendover poet Will Burns. Mr Gardam said: "Will is going to be running a creative writing workshop for families where everyone will leave with their own family poem to treasure for years to come." On Friday, August 29, visitors can join the Marvellous Matilda Walk, a guided tour of the Great Missenden high street and library that inspired parts of the novel. Mr Gardam said: "There will also be the Crunchem Hall games in the courtyard every day where visitors will be able to Splat the Snozzcumber or play Dream Jar Hoopla. "We have different workshops and activities taking place every week throughout the summer, so I encourage visitors to check our website before booking." Tickets cost £11.95 for adults and £9.95 for children and concessions, with under-fives admitted free. There is a small additional charge for workshops. Pre-booking is not essential, but is recommended for workshops as places fill up quickly. For more information, call 01494 892 192 or visit the Roald Dahl Museum website.
BBC News
04-07-2025
- Climate
- BBC News
A413 to close again for repairs after void found under surface
An A-road will be closed again to allow for repairs to be carried out after a void appeared beneath its was directed around a section of the A413 between Great Missenden and Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire, on 2 July, while the extent of the hole was Council said: "We have found what we believe to be an old defunct drainage channel almost two metres under the road surface, which likely pre-dates the construction of the A413."In order to carry out essential repairs, we will need to close the A413 in this area from 06:00 BST on 5 July to 06:00 on 7 July. Diversions will be in place." Thomas Broom, Buckinghamshire Council's cabinet member for transport, said: "We are working closely with utility companies already operating nearby to coordinate efforts and minimise disruption. "However, we strongly advise motorists to avoid the area over the weekend if possible."The authority said it has also been dealing with a water leak in Great Missenden, which is not linked to the drainage channel. Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
BBC News
02-07-2025
- Automotive
- BBC News
Buckinghamshire road fully closed while hole investigated
A road has been closed while a hole in the carriageway was Council said the A413 in Great Missenden would be fully shut while "the void" was a diversion was in place, the authority advised drivers to avoid the area and find alternative highways team posted on X: "We do not know what has caused it, but we are on site and prioritising this investigation." Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Telegraph
23-06-2025
- Automotive
- Telegraph
‘Get the b----- job done': The HS2 nightmare being prolonged by Starmer's delay
A bad day in Wendover, a small town flanked by the Chiltern Hills, might go something like this. Open the front door and enjoy the dulcet tones of a construction site firing up for the morning shift. Head to the car only to find it covered in dust. Wipe down the wing mirrors and hit the road, your blood pressure already mounting. Take care to avoid the potholes caused by the steady stream of heavy traffic which has long been pummelling the tarmac and make your way to the A413. Ah, it's closed. You'll have to go the long way round; the long way round which is rapidly filling up with other commuters with the same problem, who are now going to spend their morning sitting in a queue just to get as far as Great Missenden, the next town over. Meanwhile, a call comes from your wife. The station is closed. Can you come and get her? You both decide to abandon the commutes and work from home. It's a nice day; why not bring your laptops out into the garden? Sadly the birdsong and other gentle trillings that should accompany life in the English countryside have been replaced by JCBs shovelling chalk. Back inside, then. Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day. A sense of grim resignation washed over the people of Wendover last week as Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, gave an update on HS2. The building of Britain's high-speed rail network won't, in a surprise to precisely no one here, be completed on its current schedule and budget. It is to be delayed beyond 2033, Alexander said, telling Parliament there was 'no reasonable way to deliver' on the target to have trains running between London and Birmingham by then. She did not set a new date for completion. 'We knew this day was going to come, because we could see this car crash happening for years,' says Andy Band, who has lived in Wendover for 30 years. Band has been part of the local group which has worked to try to mitigate the impact of the line on people here since 2011 when the scheme was first announced. If the experience of simply living in Wendover for the past 14 years sounds trying, then representing the community sounds utterly exhausting. Band, a construction engineer by trade, tells horror stories of plummeting house prices, constant road diversions, and foolish decisions leading to damaging consequences which he could see coming a mile off. We meet in a pub, the Shoulder of Mutton, in the centre of town. There are a few people enjoying lunch in the sunny dining room, or a thirst quenching pint outside, but it isn't as busy as it ought to be. 'This place should be heaving,' says Band. It is a hot day and Wendover is known as the gateway to the Chilterns, a hotspot for walkers. From day one, Band and others with expertise and local knowledge raised the point that the geological make up of the ground here would make it challenging to tunnel, as the aquifer (underground layers of porous rock and dirt that allow groundwater to pass through) acts as a feeder to the streams which are in the Thames catchment. Cutting through it would not be straightforward – far better, they said, to tunnel under it. 'We warned them repeatedly and we had expert engineers who were saying to them, 'look guys this is going to cost you a fortune'. We dread to think how much it's cost them. 'The solution has taken them years and years and years to put together – from 2015 to 2023. In engineering terms that's ridiculous. Eight years to put together a solution for something they could have avoided from day one. That set the scene for not listening to the local population.' It took the project 'a long while to get going – there was a lot of land clearance'. 'A lot of the footpaths were diverted and ridiculous amounts of fencing were put up.' Today, much of the fencing has photographs of trees on it – they seem almost mocking given how much greenery has been flattened to make way for the line. After the clearance came the construction of the so-called green tunnel – a mile-long tunnel running past the town alongside the existing railway. HS2 says it's to be buried in shrubs, eventually. That may be the case, but for now it looks like someone has dropped a nuclear bunker in the middle of the Chilterns. Or as Band says, 'like the McDonald's arches'. Recent years have seen consistent road closures and heavy traffic as the tunnel was built. 'We've put up with it for three years and we've probably got another three years of that sort of level of impact. 'Excuse the pun, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel for that bit. The thing is what's going to happen in two years time, three years time.' Band, 60, says protesting against the fact of HS2 is a thing of the past – the damage has already been done. 'The community have accepted it's a fait accompli. We can't stop it.' Quite reasonably, though, they'd rather this 'nightmare' didn't take over their lives for years to come. Band suspects a chaotic hierarchy – with the Department for Transport (DfT) at the top, then HS2 Ltd, then the construction company – is partly to blame. 'The bottom line is get the b----- job done. And the way to do it is get the organisation sorted out. Give Mark Wild [the new CEO of HS2] the tools. Get rid of the civil servants that are causing the problem. And get him to finish a clear scope of work.' While the construction rumbles on (and rumble it does – you can hear the site from the pub door), living and working here has become increasingly tiresome. 'People are leaving the area. A lot of my friends have had enough. I can't – my house has probably devalued by about 20 per cent. I'm within 300m of the line. And now I'm saying bloody hell why am I putting up with this?' The roads are 'in an appalling state'. 'There are potholes all over the place. Buckinghamshire council do not have the finances. HS2 deny it's their problem.' It's not hard to understand why. 'When you're running 40, 50 tonne trucks along the road every hour it's going to rip the road up.' Then there are the businesses. 'Our coffee shops are suffering at the moment on a weekly basis. The A413, which is the main road, is closed again tonight for three days. What that does is it reduces the traffic into Wendover. 'The railway has been shut one weekend in every two or three for the past year. So that stops the footfall.' At Rumsey's Chocolaterie in town, Judith Workman and Sonia Stancombe are enjoying an ice cream. Workman lives in a hamlet on top of the hill overlooking Wendover. The past few years living alongside an HS2 construction site have been 'absolutely atrocious'. 'We see it from our house and we hear it every single day. My garden used to be my sanctuary. I sometimes have to go in from my garden because of the noise.' The diversions are the biggest source of irritation, says Workman, 65, who works at Amersham Hospital, some 17 miles from Wendover. Driving home late one night with her husband, they found both the direct and the long routes home were blocked. 'We said to this man, 'we're trying to get home, we can't go through Aylesbury, we can't come through here, what do you suggest?' He said 'go and stay in a hotel for the night'.' A ludicrous suggestion, particularly as they had dogs at home to get back to. 'It took me nearly two hours once to get to my shift,' says Stancombe, 68, who also works for the hospital trust. It's the impact on the countryside she finds so disappointing. 'When you're changing the landscape and destroying ancient woods. It's terrible.' For Workman, 65, it's the sheer pointlessness of it. HS2's proponents say the London to Birmingham line will add much-needed capacity to Britain's rail network. But Workman says: 'We don't need it, it's not going to be used, and it's going on until 2033. Who is that benefitting? Still, says her friend, 'it's done now, isn't it?' That grim resignation again. A sad indictment of what it is to live alongside a British infrastructure project in 2025. Verity Van der Meer, who works in the chocolate shop, says that closures on the existing line are reducing the number of daytrippers from London on sunny weekends. And during the week, the commuter footfall has lessened. 'It does affect business. I think it affects people coming to Wendover in general. 'Commuters tend to have to go from Aylesbury or Amersham because they don't want to take the replacement bus. And schools. We've got a couple of secondary schools [near] here and they would come through to get an after school ice cream. They're now finding other routes to get home.' Outside the deli, No. 2 Pound Street, three friends are enjoying lunch in the shade. Robert Brown is a local farmer whose family have been farming here for 114 years. 'They've taken half my land. They take it and then they hand you some back and in between you can't farm it. You have to get compensation. We haven't had any compensation since 2022.' Recently, he found himself having to wait nearly an hour for an HS2 security guard to come and open a gate which had been installed on the edge of his land. His flock of sheep had found their way onto the road and needed herding back to the field. Sue Boyce has lived in the area for 39 years. Originally from Manchester, she can't understand the need for a high speed train. 'I can go to Manchester from Milton Keynes in an hour and 35 minutes [on the existing route]. And people are working from home now,' she says. 'They should have abandoned it when they realised commuters can work at home. Lifestyles have changed.' Boyce, in her sixties, says her car is 'filthy every day' from the dust. Her friend Jane Stockton, 68, has lived in the area for 47 years. It's the road closures which get to her. 'All of this is costing millions and millions, and what for?' If you wanted to find an answer to that question, you need only walk five minutes up the hill from the Shoulder of Mutton. When you're in the centre of Wendover, with its attractive Tudor-style houses, independent shops and the Chiltern Hills in the distance, it's hard to imagine there is a major construction site a stone's throw away. But sure enough, crest the hill and your throat fills with the taste of hot dust. From a bridge you can see that where there used to be green there is now dirt – great mounds of it, like a quarry. 'All the trees have disappeared there,' says Malachi Stephens, who works in the chocolate shop. 'It's not the most sightly. You don't see the wildlife any more.' A spokesman for HS2 Ltd says the firm is 'working hard to reduce disruption for people living in Wendover'. 'This includes reusing excavated soil for nearby landscaping and installing a conveyor across the A413 to avoid putting extra lorries on local roads. We're also providing almost a million pounds in community funding to projects such as the Wendover Woods activity centre, swimming pool refurbishments and local sports clubs. 'Once complete, a tunnel will carry trains past the town with landscaping, new grassland and woodland to blend the railway into the countryside.' For their part, the Department for Transport says Alexander has 'drawn a line under the historic mishandling of HS2 and is determined to put an end to the cycle of delays that has plagued this project and prolonged disruption for those living nearby'. A spokesman adds: 'We're grateful to the residents of Wendover for their continued patience as the work is carried out.' In the Whitewater cafe, one local sums it up succinctly. 'It is what it is,' he says with a shrug. 'What can you do?' Not an awful lot.
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Wonderfully elegant' Victorian family house on market for close to £2m
A "wonderfully elegant" Victorian family home is on the market for a guide price close to £2 million. Laurel House in Oxford Street, Lee Common, near Great Missenden, offers 2,527 square feet of living space over two floors. Approached via a sweeping driveway, the detached five-bedroom property is listed for sale by Savills with a guide price of £1.95 million. Inside the Victorian house on the market for nearly £2 million (Image: Savills) Arranged around a traditional Victorian entrance hall with an original staircase, the ground floor features a triple aspect bay-fronted living room with an open fireplace and French doors which lead to a rear garden. Other rooms on the ground include a bay-fronted family room with wood-burning stove and a formal dining room. Positioned at the rear of the house with views over the garden is a triple aspect kitchen/breakfast room. Inside the Victorian house on the market for nearly £2 million (Image: Savills) This features a hand-built Simon Taylor country-style kitchen with a tiered central island and an Aga oven. Two sets of doors open to a rear patio and gardens. On the first floor, a split-level landing provides access to four double bedrooms and a further fifth bedroom, which could also be used as a study. Inside the Victorian house on the market for nearly £2 million (Image: Savills) The principal bedroom has a bay window overlooking the gardens and an ensuite bathroom. The remaining bedrooms are served by a family bath and shower room. The gardens are laid to lawn and bordered by mature hedging. The Victorian house on the market for nearly £2 million (Image: Savills) A patio to the rear of the house provides space for outside entertaining and there is also a landscaped area with raised vegetable beds. A large block-paved parking area is situated to the side of the house in front of a detached double garage. Property agent Mike Lillitou, head of office at Savills in Amersham, said: "There are few houses on the market that compare to Laurel House – so wonderfully elegant and in just the most delightful position. Inside the Victorian house on the market for nearly £2 million (Image: Savills) "Nestled well within a generous half acre plot in a highly regarded village location, the property has been enlarged and greatly improved to provide light and spacious accommodation over two well-planned floors. "A classic and sophisticated feel highlights many of its original features, while the lovingly maintained rear gardens are an absolute joy. "Benefitting from a high degree of privacy and seclusion, the property also has the benefit of being within the catchment area of some popular grammar schools, plenty of local amenities and excellent connectivity to London via nearby Amersham or Chesham." Lee Common is a thriving community village in the heart of the Chilterns, offering facilities including a village shop and Church of England nursery and infant school for children aged four to seven.
