Most leaders have to wait until after they’ve died for the statues and monuments of them to go up. But all the Trowbridge town council leader, Stewart Palmen, needed to see his likeness in stone was a planning dispute.
An angry builder in the middle of a three-year spat with local authorities has erected a stone gargoyle-like carving of Palmen on a roof in Trowbridge.
The sculpture of Palmen’s face, with his signature half-moon spectacles and the bushy beard he wore in his council photo, shows the council leader sticking out his tongue with a pointed expression in his stone eyes.
The sculpture, which is around a foot tall, sits perched on the corner of the building at the heart of the dispute, looking down a street in central Trowbridge, a parish with the population of just over 37,000.
Palmen suspected that the builder, 71-year-old Michael Thomas, had put up the sculpture “to wind me up”. “But I’m quite proud of it,” Palmen, 61, said. “I live just around the corner so I quite like it.”
The grotesque – a carving of monstrous features with no functional architectural purpose, as opposed to a gargoyle, which is a statue with a spout to convey water away from the sides of a building – went up about three weeks ago after nearly three years of dispute between Thomas and planning authorities.
Thomas had begun work in 2020 to convert the former one-storey pizza shop on Newtown into a three-storey building, telling neighbours that he was turning the shop into a multiple-bedroom house, Palmen said.
But Thomas had not applied for planning permission. Council enforcement asked him to stop work and apply for permission, but his application was rejected because of the size of the project and the fact that it was in a conservation area, Palmen said.
Thomas appealed against the decision but his appeal was rejected, and though he was ordered to return the building to its original state, he instead began work to convert it into two storeys.
Thomas returns on 27 October to magistrates court, where he could face a heavy fine.
“He seems to have taken this all very personally and believes that I have set out to stop him from building his project and turned all the neighbours against him,” Palmen said.
Thomas, who could not be reached for comment, told the Wiltshire Times that the council doesn’t “follow the rules”. “They make them up as they go along,” he said. “If council officers are not following the rules, why should I?”
“I am going to carry on building against their order and allow them to take me to court,” Thomas said. “I am not afraid of going to jail, I have been jailed twice before and I’m told that these days they have toilets and televisions so I don’t think that it will be a hardship.”
Depending on what the enforcement team decides at his court date next month, the grotesque could stay up, should Thomas gain planning permission. If it does not, Palmen said he’d like to buy it from Thomas. “It would be nice in the garden.” he said.
