West Berkshire Council has told Pippa Matthews and James Matthews to tear up an unauthorised car park at their country estate in Kintbury after a planning appeal was dismissed in July. The order brings the row over Barton Court to a head, with the couple now facing the task of removing a 400-square-metre hard standing laid across a former paddock.
People searching for Pippa Middleton are finding the dispute because it has moved from planning paperwork to an enforcement outcome. The council’s instruction follows a failed retrospective application in November last year, a refusal in February and then a Government-appointed inspector’s decision in July to dismiss the appeal. Mr Matthews, 51, and Mrs Matthews, 43, bought the 145-acre Barton Court property for £15.5 million in 2022.
The case matters because the land was not just any spare field. Before the work began, the site blended into the surrounding meadow and had been used for grazing and haymaking. Planning inspectors said the development was directly harming the rural landscape, adding a visually intrusive and urbanised feature to an otherwise open meadow and eroding the open and undeveloped rural character of the North Wessex Downs.
The estate argued that the parking area was needed for visiting anglers and for the upkeep of the land, saying the fishing rights along the river are a significant income stream that supports the wider maintenance of the estate. Local parishioners, though, said they were shocked to discover that meadowland had been turned into a private car park, and residents told the council no consultation had taken place before the work was carried out.
That is the point of friction in the case: the estate says the car park helps fund the land’s upkeep, while inspectors found that the same development damaged the landscape the estate is meant to protect. Barton Court was once owned by Sir Terence Conran, and villagers have also linked the meadow to Monty and Drummer, the heavy horses that pulled the barge along the nearby Kennet and Avon Canal.
West Berkshire Council has now drawn a clear line. The car park was built without consent, the appeal is over and the estate has been told to remove it. The unanswered question is not whether the development was rejected, but how quickly the land will be put back and what the council will do if it is not.
