Christopher Green fancied a bit of regal splendour when he snapped up a pair of wrought iron gates from a builder who said they had come from the Hampton Court Palace estate.

He thought the 8ft-high gates almost gave the entrance to his home a royal seal of approval.

But when he paid £2,000 for the gates, he hadn't counted on having to get the approval of council planners to put them up.

After being asked to submit a retrospective planning application, he was stunned when planners said his gates were "pretentious" and suggested they be removed - along with the gate posts. South Oxfordshire district councillors could not make up their minds and held a site meeting outside Christopher and Annette Green's home in Appleford Road, Long Wittenham.

They decided to defer a decision after suggesting that Mr Green reduce the proposed 11ft height of the brick piers.

Mr Green had already won planning consent to re-site the front entrance of their five-bedroom house further away from the busy junction of the Appleford Road with the B4016 Abingdon Road to Didcot in order to make it safer to drive in and out of the property. Mr Green said he had not realised he would have to get planning permission and was surprised when he was asked to submit a planning application.

He said: "The road is quite busy and we wanted to relocate the driveway away from the junction. We wanted to create a wider entrance set slightly back from the road so my family could clearly see vehicles passing in both directions as we drove in and out."

But Martin Armstrong, of the council's planning appeals and enforcement team, said Mr Green's house was in an isolated position surrounded by fields at the edge of an "area of great landscape value". The main issue was whether the entrance gates, walls and piers were on a scale and design appropriate to the area, he said.

"In this particular case, it is considered that the gates and piers are undesirably urban and pretentious," said Mr Armstrong said in a report to the council's western area planning sub committee.

They were "out of proportion with the size of the property and of a design that is inappropriate for a house in the countryside which has open or soft landscaped boundaries with the adjacent roads and fields". Councillors were told permission for the gates should be refused.

Following the site meeting, councillors agreed that the gates might be permitted to stay - if the piers were slightly reduced in height.

Cllr Ann Ducker said while some people might not agree with such ornate gates in the middle of the countryside, "they are not particularly conspicuous as you drive past them".

As well as deferring the final decision for the piers to be modified, councillors imposed a condition that two ornate red and white Cross of St George shields in the centre of each gate should be removed.

Mr Green said: "I have already painted out the shields and will be happy to reduced the height of the piers."

Story date: Saturday 04 September

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.