As more than 200 smartly dressed residents pack the sports hall of Alderley Edge School for Girls on a chilly Friday evening, the atmosphere is more of a prize-giving than an inaugural skirmish. Yet trouble is brewing among the Victorian villas and idyllic lanes of Cheshire.

The locals are embarking on what they hope will be a ground-breaking campaign to regain control over planning laws they say are turning one of Britain’s wealthiest villages into a building site. This is the first step.

Traditionally a suburban haven for industrialists from Manchester, 14 miles to the north, Alderley Edge has been taken over in recent years by a new kind of wealth: footballers and their perma-tanned wives, and the developers eager to cater to their whims. As a result, the area’s characteristic redbrick houses are being demolished at a startling rate and replaced by ugly mega-mansions.

“Rome is burning and something must be done,” Martin Sinker, a retired engineer and campaigner against overdevelopment, tells the meeting, chaired by George Osborne, the shadow chancellor and local MP. “Replacing existing housing stock with vastly more expensive mansions removes a crucial rung on the property ladder for local families and has an irreversible effect on the social mix of the village.”

The meeting, convened by the parish council, has been called at the behest of the Edge Association, a residents’ group for which Sinker, 65, is the spokesman. Before them is a motion accusing developers of ignoring planning guidelines and complaining that the sheer scale of building going on in Alderley Edge “amounts to an unfair disruption of residents’ quiet enjoyment”. The motion, carried by an overwhelming majority, is not binding. However, Sinker believes it will send a powerful message to candidates campaigning in local elections on May 1.

Alderley Edge is said to have more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else in the country. Recent Land Registry figures show that 6% of £1m-plus homes in England and Wales are in Cheshire, up from 3% five years ago. Designer shops and upmarket delis have sprung up to cater to the new residents – the Oddbins sells more than 150 bottles of champagne here a week.

A similar picture is true in other villages across Cheshire, which lies to the south and west of Manchester. The influx of new money has become known as “the Rooney effect”, after the England striker Wayne Rooney and his fiancée, Coleen McLoughlin, knocked down a five-bedroom Victorian house in nearby Prestbury in 2004, to build an ostentatious £4.5m mansion, nicknamed Wayn-sor Castle and, worse, Chav Towers.

The footballers Peter Crouch, Cris-tiano Ronaldo and Rio Ferdinand live in the area, as does Andrew Flintoff. The England cricketer was denied planning permission last month to build a five-storey house in place of the mansion in Mottram St Andrew, near Alderley Edge, that he bought last year for £1.85m from Mark Hughes, the Black-burn Rovers manager.

Residents insist they have nothing against the footballers and other celebrities, many of whom are star guests at village events. “Our concern is with commercial developers who care nothing for the interests of the community,” says Ian Standen, 65, secretary of the Edge Association.

Their complaints have been echoed by Alan Garner, 73, a children’s author best known for the fantasies The Weird-stone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, who says his family can trace its local links back to 1592. The real scourge, he says, are “hideous” gated communities and the new shops fast replacing the old village stores. “Now it is just nail bars, wine bars and shops selling balloons,” he says.

In January, Garner said he was putting Toad Hall, his £1.5m home in Blackden, six miles from Alderley Edge, into a charitable trust to prevent its grounds being built on after his death. He says his children supported his decision. “Neither I nor my wife could bear the thought of the house falling into the hands of some footballer’s wife who might destroy 10,000 years of heritage to build a tennis court,” he says.

Since 2004, Alderley Edge and the surrounding borough of Macclesfield have been subject to tight planning restrictions, with no new land released for private housing. Developers have found new and lucrative ways to ply their trade. “Developers don’t just go away for the length of the moratorium,” says Frank Keegan, a local councillor for Macclesfield. “They take down a property worth £700,000-£800,000 and put up a new one on the same site that will fetch more than £2m.”

For residents Sarah Shorland, a lecturer, and Elizabeth Mooney, a fitness instructor, the Beechside development is a case in point. A single dwelling was demolished despite strong local opposition; the replacement was two houses crammed onto the same plot. To make things worse, they overlook Alderley Edge’s cricket and tennis club.

Isn’t this merely history repeating itself, though? The villages in Cheshire were built in the 1850s and 1870s to cater for high-rolling Mancunian cotton traders; some houses feature gothic minarets, others were built in the style of Swiss cottages. Surely these new mansions with their gymnasiums and triple garages are the modern equivalent?

Commercial developers declined to take part in the debate – even though a handful were spotted sitting quietly at the back of the hall – but Andrew Nowell, who runs a local estate agency, accuses the locals of overreacting. “They’re not demolishing good houses; on the whole, they’re demolishing substandard properties built in the 1960s that don’t hold any great architectural merit,” he says, noting that most new properties are built on the exact footprint of the houses they replace. “I think a lot of what they’re finding hard is the disruption while they’re being built.”

Back in the sports hall, Tom Marshall, 62, a retired chartered surveyor, believes “local democracy” is at stake. “In the past 10 years, the planning process has become deliberately removed from the people it affects,” he says. When a show of hands is held, only six people vote against the motion. But will the locals win their battle? Disgruntled residents across the country will be holding their breath for the next instalment.

www.edgeassociation.com

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