Local residents living around one of South Bristol’s urban woods have been left shocked after discovering the entire thing is up for sale. The owner of Birch Wood, which stretches from the River Avon opposite Conham River Park into the heart of St Anne’s, has put the entire wood – almost nine acres – up for sale for a total of around £300,000.
But the owner said they are prepared to sell off smaller chunks of the wood – in parcels as small as a large garden – giving people the opportunity to buy their own piece of woodland in Bristol for as little as £25,000.
Birch Wood is being marketed by North Somerset agents David James as a ‘fantastic opportunity’ and a woodland that could be turned into ‘amenity, recreational or environmental use’ – as long as the new owner gets planning permission first.
The woods up for sale begin at the side of the St Anne’s tunnel on the main Bristol to Bath railway line and run north east on the side of the slope above the Bristol Ariel Rowing Club and the riverside cottages at Pump House Lane. The main part of the wood – and the biggest single parcel of land that could be bought – is the one behind that runs north away from the river, separating the back gardens of Bangor Grove, the cul-de-sacs off Robertson Road and Wootton Road, where the woods are on level ground.
A local group of residents set up a Birch Wood Appreciation Group, where volunteers organised themselves to clear rubbish, open up paths that were blocked by fallen trees, and generally looked after the woods, which have had a mixed run of owners in the 21st century.
The woods were owned by a property developer who set up a company to own them. But when the area of woodland away from the river was kept out of the 2014 Local Plan and confirmed as being a Site of Nature Conservation that should not be built on, the developers sold the land to the Boomtown Festivals organisers and dissolved their company.
Since then, the woods have been left largely untouched, but are now up for sale again – and this time for a total of £300,000.
The three smallest parcels, each with an asking price of between £25,000 and £35,000, are located at the southern tip of the woods, close to the railway tunnel on the slope between Rose Bush Gardens and the rowing club. Two other parcels of land are an acre and a half and almost three acres, on the slope above Pump House Lane, and are up for sale for £50,000 and £75,000 respectively, and the biggest single parcel of land is the almost four acres of the steep slope between Bangor Grove and the part of St Annes along Robertson Road. That’s up for sale for £100,000.
The sale comes after two other, more well-known areas of woodland were controversially sold in the past 18 months. The woods in the Nightingale Valley, a short distance away in Brislington, were sold late last year, to the concern of a group of locals who had been managing it voluntarily for decades. And across the other side of the River Avon, the Blackswarth Road Wood, above Crews Hole, was sold for £245,000 at auction, despite a huge fundraising effort by conservationists to raise enough to buy it.