Its innovative design won the Buttercross Works housing development in the Cotswolds a prestigious award shortly after it was built.
But today that prize has lost its sparkle for the estate’s long-suffering residents who have been forced to put up with years of flooding chaos.
A botched drainage system along the central road into the development in in Witney, Oxon, has left a significant section of it under almost permanent floodwater.
Residents, often elderly people living in a retirement home metres from the floodwater in Buttercross Lane, regularly fall after slipping in the water or on the greasy surface it causes to surrounding pavements.
And many complain they are unable to sleep at night because of the sound of vehicles splashing through the water keeps them awake.
One, Charlotte Grant, 34, said living on the modern-looking housing estate has become ‘a nightmare’.
The mother of four, who works in mental health, said the stress of living in a near-permanent flood zone has left her and her neighbours in a constant state of anxiety.
She and other homeowners on the estate want to sell up and leave, but, as she says, she doubts anyone would be willing to buy their properties in the light of the flooding problem.
She said: ‘Living here has become an absolute nightmare. Because the developers failed to put in adequate drainage, we have to live with this almost permanent flooding.
‘The only time it disappears is after a prolonged dry spell of a month or two, but then we have to deal with the fall-out of that in terms of a wrecked road and pavements, and the muck and dust that generates.
‘The materials used to construct the road, which is mainly brickwork, break up in the water and then we left with a mud bath, which quickly spreads everywhere.
‘That makes the pavements incredibly greasy and I’ve seen numerous people fall over onto the ground as a result.
‘There’s an elderly care home at the end of the road and I often have to pick up elderly people who have slipped and fallen.
‘Many of them use motorised mobility scooters and they too have enormous difficulty getting through the water. One guy last week rode his scooter through the flood water, then tipped over when he tried to mount a curb.
‘He hasn’t been able to see the curb because of the high water and it tipped the motor scooter upside down. He was badly injured. This kind of thing as a regular occurrence here.
‘We are desperate to sell up and move, but who’s going to buy my house in the circumstances?’
Charlotte and her Plasterer husband Kieron bought their ‘dream home’ brand-new for £250,000 in 2014.
But, despite the development having won a highly commended prize at the Local Authority Building Control Awards in 2017, she saw signs of poor building work from the day she moved in.
She said: ‘I walked into my kitchen on day one and the sink had caved in where someone must have sat on it. I complained to the developer and they went down to another house down the road, which haven’t been sold yet, ripped out their sink and put it into our kitchen.
‘There were loads and loads of snagging problems, in addition to the sink issue.
‘Everything is wonky. We also discovered early on that the bath wouldn’t drain, so that too had to be replaced in the first couple of weeks.
‘But the worst problem of all is that the developer failed to connect more than 40 of the houses on the estate to the mains drainage system, so we instead have to pay around £120 a year each for a private drainage system on the estate.
‘And now I’ve read that the company that built it has more than £400,000 worth of debts, so I guess whatever guarantees we have as new build homes will no longer be valid. That is extremely worrying, given how everything has been botched.
‘But it is the road drainage that is the biggest headache.
‘For the past three or four years, whenever there’s the slightest drop of rain it fills with water and because the drainage system doesn’t work at all, it just floods and floods. The only time it starts to disperse is in a hot dry spell like this summer when it evaporates in the air.
‘But that leaves us with this mud, which then becomes dust, so everywhere is filthy. It all gets trodden in through the house, especially with four young children, and it is awful to live with. I just want to move away.’
Across the road – and across the floodwater – her neighbour Richard Wakefield is equally fed up.
‘I want to move, but this house is probably worthless at the moment because it is right next to the flooding, as you can see.
‘It would be dishonest to put it on the market in the summer when it’s dry and if anyone want to come and look at it now, there’s no way they’d want to buy it.
‘My wife and I can’t sleep at night because of the noise of the splashing as delivery vans go up and down here 24/7 and we’re both very anxious about it.’
In his garage, Richard shows me buckets of mud and silt he and his children have spent days shovelling from the road outside their home in a forlorn effort to improve the drainage.
‘We spent all day this weekend filling these buckets up, but in truth it’s made absolutely no difference. The only difference it’s made is to my health because I hurt my back doing it and had to take two days off work.
‘I am at the end of my tether with this. We sent email after email to the developers but they ignored them.
‘Eventually our local MP came down and then the council started sending pumping machinery to pump it out for a couple of weeks, but now they don’t attend any more and the flood is getting really bad again.’
The development, which is around two miles from Jeremy Clarkson’s Farmer’s Dog pub restaurant, was built on a former warehouse around a decade ago.
Photographer Mr Wakefield said he and his family are ‘constantly stressed knowing it’s a ticking time bomb before our house gets flooded’ and he added that he was disappointed with the developers ‘who decided a permeable brick drainage system would work’.
District councillor for Witney South, Michael Brooker said the situation was ‘completely avoidable’ if the developer had put the drainage in the ‘right place’.
Earlier this month it was revealed that the developer of the flood-ridden estate is £400k in debt, according to Companies House documents.
Bower Mapson, the house-builder who developed Buttercross Works, owes a total of £434,164, papers filed on Companies House show.
In a summary of its financial statements up to March 31 this year, it said the firm owed £145 to trade creditors, £233,020 to other creditors and £200,999 to participating interests.
The document was filed on November 21, just days after Peter Mapson was officially removed as a director for the Swindon-based company on October 28.
