Just last week, we heard that Pippa Middleton is disliked in her adopted village of Kintbury. Four years ago, Pippa and her terribly moderately wealthy husband James Matthews sold their London home and moved to Kintbury, where they’ve been beefing with villagers, neighbors, ramblers and service workers ever since. Pippa is apparently terribly grand and a sh-tty tipper, and she and TMW James spent years blocking peasants from their huge property. Still, the villagers have persisted in bitching out Pippa and James over everything. A few months ago, we heard that villagers have an issue with a newly constructed parking lot on the property. Well, the village council has officially ordered Pippa and James to dig up the parking lot.

Pippa Middleton and her hedge fund manager husband have been ordered to dig up a car park they built without permission on a meadow in the Berkshire village of Kintbury. In council documents seen by The Times, parishioners said they were “shocked” to see a section of the meadow on the approach road to their village suddenly turned into a private car park for the use of anglers fishing on the couple’s country estate.

They wrote to West Berkshire council to express their concern that no one appeared to have been consulted before 400 square metres of agricultural hard standing was laid across the meadow. The council has now ruled that the “visually intrusive and urbanised” development broke planning rules and “eroded a measure of the open and undeveloped rural character” of the North Wessex Downs.

The former paddock, which was previously used for grazing and making hay, is part of Barton Court, a £15.5m, 145-acre estate previously owned by Sir Terence Conran. It has been owned by Middleton, 43, the sister of the Princess of Wales, and her husband, James Matthews, 51, since 2022. The meadow at the centre of the dispute was known by villagers as the summer home of Monty and Drummer, two heavy horses used to draw the barge on the nearby Kennet and Avon Canal. The horses graze elsewhere since the change of ownership of the land.

In its retrospective planning application, representatives of Barton Court estate argued that it needed to turn the field into an anglers’ car park because “the income derived from the estate from sale of its fishing rights along the river is a significant income stream which supports the wider upkeep of the land”. However, inspectors found that the development was “directly harming the rural landscape”.

Prior to development, inspectors said “the site had the appearance of forming part and parcel of the much larger meadow, thereby contributing to the openness and tranquillity of the rural area found beyond the development limits of Kintbury.

“Due to its size and engineered appearance, the development has introduced a visually intrusive and urbanised feature into an otherwise open meadow. It has eroded a measure of the open and undeveloped rural character” of the North Wessex Downs, they added.

The planning dispute is the latest conflict between the couple and their neighbours in Kintbury, a quaint, canal-side village between Hungerford and Newbury. One resident, who asked not to be named, said there remained “a lot of ill will and residual anger” after Middleton and Matthews won their battle to block public right of way through the estate.

The resident said many people were disappointed by the decision. “I taught my son to ride his bike on that path,” he said, adding that converting part of the meadow into a car park without permission “is not very village-y”.

[From The Times]

Basically, the villagers were pissed that Pippa and James razed a lovely meadow to create an eyesore parking lot for fishermen who pay to fish on the Barton Court estate. And the council agreed with the villagers and ordered Pippa and James to dig up the ugly, tacky parking lot. I get it – it’s more common in America to find parking lots or the most random buildings sitting in some of the prettiest and most scenic areas (even if those scenic areas are privately owned). It’s awful. And man, Pippa is really terrible at being “the lady of the manor” with any kind of noblesse oblige towards the peasants. I also wonder if there’s some kind of throughline with Middleton women – a lack of taste and a lack of interest in preservation. Can James do something about his tacky wife?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.