ARTISTS are showing their work in support of the high-profile campaign against building in Castle Point’s green belt.

The Hands Off Our Greenbelt group has been organising protests since last summer, over plans to allow as many as 750 new homes to be built in Thundersley.

Now the group is staging Saturday’s art exhibition as a peaceful protest, which it hopes will encourage people to think about what the green belt means to them.

Eight artists will be showing their paintings, photography, jewellery and sculpture inspired by the loss of green land to development, including a life-size figure, covered in flowers, called Nature Girl.

Hands off our Greenbelt spokesman Paul Saunders said: “All the artists on show have a passion for the green belt and nature and are horrified at the proposal to lose the land at Daws Heath.

“It’s great that we have this wide support not, just from people who live in the Daws Heath area, but from people further afield. People are giving their time and energy free of charge to show what the green belt means to them.”

The proposal to allow 750 new homes on land north of Daws Heath Road and east of Rayleigh Road was part of the borough council’s original Core Strategy document.

The group’s opposition helped persuade the council to scrap those plans, but the revised strategy suggests using more than three acres of land next to the new Essex Ford showroom as a business or industrial estate.

Artist Mandy Tout will be showing a painting entitled Flora, which she says depicts the beauty of nature and its unstable future in the face of pressures for development.

She said: “If youths are caught putting graffiti on a wall they are punished or fined for defacing our environment. Why then, can our own Government freely destroy and deface our environment for profit?

“Unlike a brick wall, which can easily be restored, once green belt land has been destroyed it may be lost for ever.”

Saturday’s exhibition runs from 9.30am until 4.30pm in St Michael’s Church Hall, in Daws Heath Road, Thundersley.