Still Standing. Still Planning. Still Daft Enough to Care: Confessions of a Rural Planner

Barry the Enforcer ate his sandwiches outside a farmer's gate for fourteen consecutive lunchtimes. Not speaking. Not knocking. Just watching. With spearmint gum and a lifetime of righteous indignation.

This is a book about Barry. And Ron — who wrote refusals before it was cool and retired with a note that said Gone to the allotment. Not coming back. And David Orange, who had two thousand hours on his flexitime record and spent them reading back issues of the Estates Gazette like they were thrillers. And Chairman Dalton, who occasionally forgot he was wearing a microphone. And Alan Vortex, who paid for planning advice in bathroom tiles.

After more than forty years in the planning system — development control, enforcement, appeals, regeneration, consultancy, and a worrying amount of crazy paving — Steve Hesmondhalgh has accumulated enough stories to fill several careers and at least one disciplinary hearing.

This is not a textbook. It will not help you pass an RTPI exam or win a committee vote. It is a memoir — part affectionate, part despairing, occasionally baffled — about what it actually means to spend a life in local government planning. The committees that defy logic. The sites that defeat gravity. The colleagues you never forget. The applications that should have been straightforward and absolutely were not.

For anyone who has ever written a report nobody read, recommended approval and watched the committee refuse it, or tried to explain to a farmer that a two-bedroom chalet is not, in planning terms, a garage — this one is for you.

Still standing. Still planning. Still, against all available evidence, daft enough to care.