David Dimbleby campaigns to save Sussex countryside

Veteran broadcaster and journalist David Dimbleby has joined a 100-strong campaign to ban more than 500 homes being built near his village in East Sussex.

Dimbleby argues that the development by Pelham Holdings in Folkington, near Eastbourne, would “destroy” the surrounding countryside, on the edge of the South Downs.

In a strongly worded letter to Wealden Council’s head of planning, Dimbleby writes: “It cannot be too strongly stressed that this is an area of outstanding natural beauty alongside which the proposed three storey or even two or one storey houses would be vandalism.”