Sunday 2 October 2022 02:51 PM Campaigners seek to BAN second home-owners changing Welsh house names to ... trends now
View
comments
Campaigners want to ban buyers changing the historic Welsh language names of second homes to English ones.
House-sellers are taking legal action to ban giving the second homes in Wales a new name because losing traditional Welsh-language house names in countryside destinations is 'culturally damaging'.
A new legal protection to prevent historic Welsh house names from being lost has been drawn up by lawyers to curb the changes to English names - such as 'Ty Gwyn' for 'Whitehouse' and 'Cartref' for 'Home'.
A petition bidding to stop the swapping out of long-standing Welsh language house names that racked up over 18,000 signatures, was debated at The Senedd in early 2021.
Legal firm Swayne Johnson has used a new covenant-based scheme to stop buyers ditching historic and evocative names, many of which date back centuries.
Campaigners want to ban buyers changing the historic Welsh language names of second homes to English ones (Pictured: Coloured houses overlooking the harbour in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales)
Pictured: Hawl i Fyw Adra pressure group walking from Nefyn to Gwynedd council HQ Caernarfon to raise awareness of the lack of proper regulating of second homes and the lack of safeguards for Welsh communities and language
Mared Williams, a solicitor based at Swayne Johnson's Ruthin branch in North Wales, said: 'I have already put this covenant into practice and am proud to play a part in ensuring that the owners of properties with historic names can protect those names for generations to come.
'There are very many house names in Wales that tell the story of the property and are part of the area's local history.
'The house or farm name adds colour and information about the building, the landscape or the people who might have once lived there.
'The name of a property is often an integral part of the story of the place and it's important that historically and culturally important Welsh place names are protected and not lost.'
The new scheme, called Diogelwn, meaning We Will Protect, was drawn up by Simon Chandler, of Manchester law firm Chandler Harris, to give legal backing to the preservation of Welsh houses and even place names.
Simon, 58, an Englishman who learned Welsh in his 50s, said: 'The idea that people can arbitrarily change the names of houses and places here seems to me to be an assault on the identity of Wales.
Pictured: A row of coloured houses along the coast in Beaumaris on the Isle of Anglesey
'I learned Welsh six years ago when I was already in my 50s and I was inspired to draft this in response to a Twitter appeal by poet and author Sian Northey who asked whether there was any way of protecting the Welsh name of her house that was about to sell.
'I looked at it from the point of view of a specialist in commercial conveyancing, and the scheme essentially enables sellers to put covenants on their properties with language group
