A furious homeowner says she has been plunged into near-darkness and left shivering in her own home after developers squeezed a new-build just inches from her living room window – despite her fighting the plans for more than a decade.
For years, applications to develop the sliver of land separating Marilyn Devonish’s semi-detached house from neighbouring properties had been thrown out by council planners.
But last year, officials approved a scheme – resulting in a new property being built directly in front of her living room window and essentially turning her £425,000 Victorian semi into more of a terraced address.
Ms Devonish claims the controversial new build, in Watford, Hertfordshire, has blocked natural light, drained warmth from her home and shattered her privacy.
She says her once daylight-filled living room is now almost pitch black, forcing her to live under artificial light even during the day.
Meanwhile, she claims that the loss of sunlight has made her home 10 degrees colder – leaving her reliant on heating for up to 17 hours a day and forced to use plug in heaters.
She has also endured flooding in her kitchen, which she believes is linked to the neighbouring development.
Photos taken seconds apart show the stark difference – with her living room now darker than her kitchen on the opposite side of her house, something she says was never the case before building began in March 2025.
Ms Devonish, a hypnotist and neurolinguistic coach, told the Daily Mail: ‘My home has been plunged into near-permanent darkness.
‘What was once the brightest room in the house is now almost pitch black. It is too dark to read in there on the sunniest day, and when it’s cloudy it feels like night has fallen indoors.
‘It’s gone beyond being a bit overlooked, I’ve just been completely shadowed. By the summer I was noticing my house was not only dark but freezing, too.
‘It was 30 degrees outside but I was still wearing a dressing gown and slippers in my home.
‘This winter has been brutal, there was one particular day where it was really, really cold. I walked in and it was like stepping into a fridge.
‘I had the heating on for 17 hours for it to start to warm, and it took me 47 hours of heating for me to be able to take off layers.
‘It takes about seven or eight hours just to feel a little bit of heat throughout the house.
‘Everything has been impacted.’
The planning saga dates back to 2009 when developers first spotted the opportunity to infill land between the houses – an area previously used as access to a workshop set back from the street.
For more than a decade, the site sat behind hoardings marked ‘land acquired for clients’, with multiple planning applications knocked back by Watford council.
Planning experts even warned that any proposal would need to be of ‘exceptional quality’ and ‘innovative design’ to overcome serious privacy and light concerns.
Yet in 2024, planners approved a new developer’s scheme for a part single-storey, part two-storey home, which is now nearing completion.
Ms Devonish, who has accused the council of failing to respond to her concerns, says the development should never have been signed off – pointing to four floor-to-ceiling glass doors that now look directly into her home of two decades.
She said: ‘My house is side-facing – that’s where the front door is – and I face that development. The side of my house is my living room and that’s what they’ve built in front of.
‘There’s probably less than 10 feet between us at the front of the house and at the back you couldn’t get a piece of paper though the gap.’
In one alarming incident, she says she walked from her bathroom to her upstairs bedroom naked – only to realise a workman was standing just feet away on a glass-roofed terrace overlooking her room.
She said: ‘The last ten months have been absolutely horrendous, the noise of people moving about and talking.
‘There have been times I’ve jumped out of my skin because someone’s talking behind me.
‘It’s beyond stressful, it’s actually sort of violating – I’ve come out the bathroom naked and I walked to pick my clothes up from my bed and felt like someone was there.
‘I turned around and there was someone standing a few feet away, literally right outside my bedroom window looking straight at me.
‘If it’s this bad now, I dread to think what it will be like once people actually move in.
‘This development has stripped my home of light, warmth, privacy and value – it no longer feels safe or liveable.’
What makes the situation worse, she says, is that it was all predicted. Ms Devonish, a former Lib Dem local councillor, objected to the plans repeatedly over ten years, warning the council exactly what would happen to her home.
Earlier applications were refused, with inspectors agreeing they would cause ‘unacceptable harm to living conditions’.
The current development was approved despite council planners being told that Ms Devonish’s living room daylight would fall below recommended levels.
In its own approval report, the council openly acknowledged the damage the scheme could cause.
It accepted that, as well as loss of light, the sheer closeness of the new dwelling to Ms Devonish’s window would ‘obscure’ her outlook and leave the room feeling enclosed.
‘As this is the sole window to a main habitable room, the loss of amenity would affect the reasonable enjoyment of the dwelling by its occupiers,’ the local authority added.
Despite this, planners ruled the harm was ‘moderate’ and outweighed by the need to build more homes. They concluded: ‘The proposal would increase the amount of dwellings on site by one, which would make efficient use of vacant land within an established residential area and make a small contribution towards increasing housing availability.’
Ms Devonish has accused the council of bowing to housing targets at the expense of existing residents.
She said: ‘There’s a huge push to ‘build, build, build’, and people like me are being sacrificed so councils can tick boxes.
‘The little sliver of land is only going to be a one or two-bed so it’s not going to tip the balance in the housing crisis.
‘I have to wonder are they almost blindly saying ‘yes’ so they can hit targets?’
‘There should be checks and balances in place to ensure that what I’ve been through doesn’t happen to anyone else.
‘There should have been safeguards in place.’
Planning papers show the scheme was backed by other neighbours on Estcourt Road, including one who described the site as ‘the hole in the wall’, adding it was ‘unsightly in its present state and off putting to any potential buyers’ on the street.
Mercer Planning, the agents for applicant Elaine Lawrence, argued that the impact of floor-to-ceiling glass panels on Ms Devonish’s home would be shielded by slatted fence panels.
The firm said the project was ‘designed to have minimal impact’ on neighbours, and concluded in its planning application: ‘The development would not materially impact on the existing level of residential amenity currently enjoyed by the occupiers of the adjacent residential properties.’
Councillor Glen Saffery, Portfolio Holder for Planning, said: ‘Watford Borough Council is required to carefully determine planning applications in accordance with national planning legislation and policy set by central government.
‘In this case, as with many developments across the country, the Council carefully assessed the proposal against the planning framework it is legally bound to follow.
‘The Council has previously raised strong objections to developments it considers harmful, including schemes brought forward under permitted development rights, but has been overruled through the appeal process where national policy limits the authority’s ability to refuse them.
‘These decisions underline the difficult constraints councils operate under as set by national legislation. Any changes to national planning law would need to be enacted by central government.’
