www.upworthy.com
76-year-old farmer refuses to leave his Godley Green land, even as 2,150 homes are built around him
From the outside gate, Far Meadow Farm looks quite standard. A fenced-off riding area with two horses; hens pecking at the ground. Trees gather around the buildings, and in the gaps between them, you can see glimpses of the moors beyond: windy, dramatic landscapes shaped by wild remoteness, rain, and lacerating winds.
Here, on a small farm in Godley, a bucolic suburb in northwest England on the edge of Manchester, you’ll find farmer Alan French, a 76‑year‑old local who refuses to let his little slice of pastoral heaven disappear—not again.
View this post on Instagram
“I just think, piss off, leave me alone, I’m not moving. Every time I move somewhere developers want it,” French told the Manchester Evening News. “This is no longer a rural place. It’s going to get worse if they get their way.”
Before moving to Godley, French had to leave two previous homes to make way for development. Now, he’s been here for 17 years, and the humble farmer is fed up. As a huge new housing project backed by Tameside Council closes in around him, he keeps repeating the same four words to anyone who asks what happens next: “I am not moving.”
A life of being pushed along
French grew up in the days when the strip of land between the Tameside and Stockport boroughs still felt rural, its fields and farmhouses sitting just outside Manchester’s reach. As the city expanded, housing estates descended on places like Romiley, a village just a few miles south of Godley, and local councils turned to a planning tool that lets them seize land for “the greater good.”
In the United Kingdom, it’s a compulsory purchase order, or CPO. In the United States, it’s eminent domain, the power government agencies use to acquire private land for things like highways, schools, pipelines, and housing.
The moors of England. Photo credit: Canva
Over the course of his life, French has had to leave two homes: both in Romiley, both because of compulsory purchase orders tied to development projects. That’s a pattern.
Now, with Godley Green Garden Village looming, he’s scared it’s happening again. Yet the 76-year-old farmer remains resolute: he will not sell Far Meadow Farm voluntarily.
What’s coming to Godley
For Tameside Council, Godley Green Garden Village is not just another development. It’s their flagship, a 15-year project that will see 2,150 homes built between Hyde and Hattersley, east of Manchester. The site sits on land that used to have green belt status, a planning zone meant to keep cities from sprawling endlessly outward. Places for Everyone, a region-wide development plan, removed this particular patch’s protected status, clearing the way for housebuilding.
Greater Manchester, like most big U.S. metros, has a housing crisis you can feel in people’s lives. Local reports describe tens of thousands of people on social housing waiting lists. Younger households can’t find anything affordable near work. Older residents struggle to downsize. Tameside Council argues that schemes like Godley Green are how they meet government-set housing targets and give more people decent places to live.
A farm. Photo credit: Canva
The outline for Godley Green goes like this: two “village” centres on either side of a small waterway called Godley Brook, each with some shops, commercial space, and community facilities. Developers say they’ll reserve more than half the land in the final master plan for open space, parks, and habitat areas. The plan also includes expanded school options, healthcare facilities, sports fields, and walking paths. About 15% of the homes—roughly 323—will count as “affordable” in a mix of rentals and ownership schemes.
Council leaders echo that language. They say the scheme has been “thought through carefully” and describe a “natural, representative community” with homes for young families, single people, and retirees. They also point to the money the project will bring for roads, schools, healthcare, and other infrastructure. Exact dates shift, but the broad picture is this: infrastructure starts soon, then the first homes a couple of years later, with a full build-out carried out over 15 years.
A community speaks out
For people in charge of meeting housing targets, Godley Green looks like a necessary piece of a large puzzle. But for those who already live there, it looks like something else.
Campaigners like Anne Tym, whose family owns land earmarked for development, emphasize that “the green belt is there for a purpose.”
During the planning process, more than 4,000 objectors spoke out against the new housing development. “Save Tameside Greenbelt” groups have sprouted up, warning residents that this new, utopian village will “ruin” an area they’ve walked, ridden, and worked on for decades. Many residents do not need to wait 15 years; their once-rural home already feels like a city, and they cite increased traffic and decreased wildlife.
“All the green space is being turned urban,” French told one reporter. “The wildlife we’ve got here is becoming less. The deer used to come into the ménage with their babies. There was one dead last week on the road because the traffic is ridiculous.”
Life on the edge of “maybe”
French’s farm sat inside early development maps for Godley Green. More recent outlines appear to wrap around him rather than over him; he now believes he’s right on the edge of the red line, while neighbors report compulsory purchase orders have landed in their mailboxes.
Planners claim compulsory purchases will be a “last resort” and that they’re trying to strike private deals with landowners first. But they also make clear they can’t rule it out. For French, that’s not reassuring.
View this post on Instagram
He doesn’t go to the consultation meetings anymore. “I can’t be bothered with it all,” he told Manchester Evening News. “I’m done with it.”
Friends and other farmers come back with updates: another committee meeting, another map, another speech about targets, homes, and growth. At planning hearings, some of them hold up banners with his name; he lets them do the shouting while he stays with the horses.
In the meantime, he feeds Yan and Tommy at the same times every day because the animals don’t care what’s on the council agenda. He points out where he can still see moorland between the trees. On some mornings, if the light is right and he looks in the right direction, it’s still possible to forget that a 15‑year construction project could soon begin on the other side of that horizon.
He knows, intellectually, that he doesn’t “own the view.” A council officer reminded him of that once. But he also knows what it feels like to lose more than bricks and mortar when a place goes. When asked where he’d go if he did have to leave, he tends to shrug. He hasn’t let himself imagine it.
“I love it here. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been,” he said.
This isn’t just a British story
If you live in the U.S., you don’t need a deep understanding of U.K. planning law to understand the shape of this. Swap the moors for a cornfield in Iowa, a ranch outside Austin, or a farming community in rural Georgia, and the outlines look familiar.
In America, the tools have different names—eminent domain instead of compulsory purchase orders, highway expansions instead of garden villages—but the basic tension is the same: a government or corporation says, “We need this land,” and your options are either to obey or to get out of the way.
All over the country, farmers have fought wind farms that cut across their fields, arguing that easements and buyouts do not compensate for a way of life being sliced up. In cities like Denver and Atlanta, long-time landowners watch new subdivisions march across what used to be their neighbors’ pastures and wonder when someone will knock on their own door.
Almost every major U.S. city now carries its own version of the Godley Green argument: We need more housing, but where do we put it without erasing the people and places that already make a place feel like home?
Holding two truths at once
It would be easy, and maybe emotionally satisfying, to file French’s story under “heroic farmer vs. greedy developers” and call it a day. It would also be easy to shrug and say, “Well, people need somewhere to live,” and move on.
The harder, truer version lives in between.
On one hand, Greater Manchester does need more homes. So do San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, and Detroit. Young families in cramped rentals and older folks stuck on waiting lists are not imaginary abstractions; they are as real as French and his horses. On the other hand, someone has to pay the price of that new stability. In French’s case, that bill has come due three times in one lifetime.
Two horses behind a gate. Photo credit: Canva
As of early 2026, Tameside councillors have granted planning permission for Godley Green again after a brief refusal. Infrastructure work could begin soon. The full build‑out will take about 15 years. No one knows how long French can hold his line. No one knows if a CPO notice will ever arrive with Far Meadow Farm on it.
For now, the story looks like this: a 76‑year‑old farmer gets up in the morning, feeds his animals, and looks out over fields that, on paper, already belong to the future. Beyond his fence, a council talks about “modern placemaking” and “representative communities.” In between those two visions is a question neither side has quite answered yet in England or in the U.S.:
When we say we’re building for the public good, how many times do we expect the same people to move?
The post 76-year-old farmer refuses to leave his Godley Green land, even as 2,150 homes are built around him appeared first on Upworthy.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
