A Garden Gnome and a Planning Notice Have Outlasted Three of My Theories
EloWeelo Brannigan filed an application for a gnome in 2023. Adaeze Nwosu-Prior has spent three years explaining it, and this month she went back to the lamp post.
It is 5.40pm on a wet street in Guildford and I am reading a planning notice by the light of my phone. The notice is for a gnome.
It went up in March 2023. Reference 23/P/00417. Proposal: single-storey rear extension to one garden gnome, with lantern roof. It is laminated and cable-tied to the lamp post. The consultation closed in April 2023. Nobody has taken it down.
EloWeelo Brannigan put it there. He commits jokes that take years to understand, and he has never explained one. In 2023 I said this was a protest against loft conversions. I said it with a chart.
In 2024 I revised. The gnome was a boundary, I said, and the notice was a fence made of paper. I wrote 900 words on this. I stand by the word count.
This month a second notice appeared beside the first. Change of use: gnome to gnome, retrospective. I took it as a pivot. Brannigan is mocking the idea that anything ever changes, I told my phone, and I recorded a voice note about patience.
The gnome is 41 centimetres tall. It was 41 centimetres tall in 2023. Nothing has been built. That, I decided, is the joke. A building application for a building that never comes.
A woman walking a spaniel stopped beside me and said, "It's at the back."
I asked what was. She said the extension. It has a little glass roof and a lamp inside. She said you can see it from the alley if you stand on the bin.
I read the notice again. It says rear. It has said rear for three years.
My next prediction is scheduled for 2029. It will be about bins.