by David Bates
Upmarket push leaves touring caravans and loyal residents stranded
A Chichester caravan park has decided to abandon its touring section in a bid to target the ‘high-end’ static market.
Park Holidays UK, who manage Lakeside Caravan Park, has lodged an application with the Chichester District Council to replace their touring section with an area housing 37 static ‘lodge-style’ caravans.
Lakeside’s management believe this will allow it to “better compete with the holiday caravan market and thereby offer a higher quality of caravan and facilities for holidaymakers.”
Their decision, however, has ruffled a few feathers, with a number of extremely disgruntled residents and undoubtedly, there will be frequent visitors deprived of a pitch for their touring caravans.
Ricky Deadman, whose grandmother is a permanent inhabitant of Lakeside Caravan Park, told the Chichester Observer that the upmarket push was forcing out loyal residents, who have been forbidden from having ‘garden sheds, fences, brick or stone objects, gnomes or garden plant or flower pots of any kind, shrubs or flower beds, washing lines of any kind, or any commercial works vehicles on site.’
Deadman’s grandmother had, over the past year, erected a fence to allow a safe area for her puppy and planted vegetables to save money; improvements which will now be redundant.
The angry resident’s grandson asked: “As regards to the no-washing lines rule, how are the residents expected to dry laundry? If they can’t dry it outside, they will need a tumble dryer”. He continued to point out that with no sheds allowed either, there would be scant space for a tumble dryer.
A Park Holidays UK representative said that the “constraints on the erection of washing lines” was “to ensure the park maintains its attractive appearance.”
Yet with people like Mrs. Deadman facing difficult decisions over her future and touring caravans no longer permitted, are they taking it too far?
