Finding our self build plot

“It’s a carrot!”

“!?!!”

“It looks like a giant carrot!”

Maybe not the best way to start focusing in on your dream self build plot, but if it looks like a giant carrot and has the charm of a giant carrot, it’s probably a giant carrot.

To allay any fears, our plot doesn’t look like a giant carrot (that one was unavailable) but it might explain if sometimes we refer to our land as ‘The Turnip’. Once you’ve started naming sites you’re interested in after root vegetables, there’s no going back I’m afraid…

Due to our lack of funds and the unique nature of our project, a plot of land from a dedicated self build plot-finding website or a site which already had planning permission was a non-starter, especially down in the South East where the land alone would be more than out total budget. No, we’d seen all too often the advice of how to get a plot and knew that to make this work we’d need to do things the hard way – find a plot and then try and get planning permission on it.

We knew the general area we were interested in which covered roughly twenty miles in all directions from the Sussex coast up to Horsham/Crawley.

The best piece of advice given and one that we would recommend is just to get out there and drive around – how things look on the ground compared with maps, satellite images, etc is incredible. This is how we first came across ‘The Carrot’ and through that, ‘The Turnip’.

Having seen a battered and weather-worn sign advertising a plot for sale we looked on our local planning authority website to discover that the site was, in fact, no-longer for sale but was to become a new services site on the busy A24. Not to be put off we looked through the plans registered for the build and could see that the area to one end of the plot (that looked suspiciously like a carrot) was not included in any actual works and was to be fenced off. On further enquiries this piece, though not being used, was not to be sold off but the seed was sown – unpromising ‘off-cuts’ of land seemed to be everywhere and of little commercial interest due to their quirky shapes and locations.

With this in mind within days Lynne had set her sights on a bunch of trees and bushes set between a petrol station, a motorway slip road and a roundabout! Mmmmmm – living the dream, eh?!?!

It looked tiny and I wasn’t convinced – it looked for all its life like some municipal planting that had been allowed to get out of hand and simply blocked the view of the services from the local residents. Perhaps some online legwork might be the way forwards I thought and I’m buggered – the plot was easily big enough to get a small home onto and remain hidden from the outside world.

A visit to the Land Registry website was in order and a special request for locating the piece of land and who owns it came up trumps. Except for the land that was the corner of a field and part of a road left over from a major re-working of the area over twenty years ago and the owners named were long gone. Over many nights of online searching and chasing down blind alleys we successfully found the current whereabouts of one of the named owners and, beyond our wildest dreams, ‘Yes – it was for sale’!

And, dear reader, we bought it….