With over 1800 documents on the planning portal and more arriving every day, it is easy to lose track and feel overwhelmed. Save Marlow’s Greenbelt volunteers looked at all the representations to date (14th October 2022) and sorted them for you. We extracted the position (object/support/neutral), the type of respondent (e.g. consultee or community organisation) and the postcode if it was available. In some cases, people self-identified as working in the film industry, or we checked their public professional records.

So what do the data tell us?

Objections > support

First of all, the objections vastly outnumber the support comments.

It is clear that the majority of locals do not want a film studio, whereas people from outside the area are generally in support. We spotted postcodes in Essex, London, Oxford, Bristol and Devon expressing their support. So the local people, who are supposed to be benefiting from the “opportunity that the film studios would offer”, have largely seen through the PR smoke & mirrors. (See e.g. our post on what a film studio really looks like.)

What is also striking is that none of the official consultees supports the scheme (10 object, 5 neutral) and none of the community organisations does either (23 object, 1 neutral).

What does support look like?

It is also interesting to understand how people are voicing their support. That’s mainly through the film studio website template:

Clearly, the only way to garner significant support for this scheme is to not require any effort or thought. Based on some of the postcodes and timestamps on those templated responses, it is likely that campaigners walked door to door to convince people to sign up (e.g. on Kingsmead Road in High Wycombe).

All objections submitted to date are unique and written by people like you, voicing their individual thoughts and concerns.

The industry view

Lastly, in this post, we look at people we have identified as working in the film industry. How do they vote?

Well, it’s reasonably simple. If you know what a film studio is like, you don’t want to live near one.

The portal is still open to objections, so please add yours if you have not already done so.