Heated debate: why Churchill's birthplace lies at the heart of UK solar battle

Row over plans to build 2 million panels on land around historic Blenheim Palace has become symbolic of a national struggle. Architecture critic Rowan Moore reports

- Rowan Moore

I'm on a slope, surveying classic English countryside - undulating, with clumps of mature oak and ash, hedgerows, huddled villages, medieval church spires.

Which, if a company called Photovolt Development Partners (PVDP) has its way, will mostly be covered from here to the horizon with the black panels of one of the largest solar farms in Europe. This proposal "is not a thing in the landscape", says one resident: "It is the landscape."

Botley West solar farm, as the project is called, would exist in a part of Oxfordshire charged with history. It would stand near the grounds of "Britain's greatest palace" (as the official website puts it), the golden-stone pile of Blenheim, built with the help of funds and land given by Queen Anne to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, in 1704. Its baroque John Vanbrugh architecture and Capability Brown park have made it, since 1987, a Unesco world heritage site. Winston Churchill was born in the palace and is buried in the nearby church of Bladon.

The proposed farm is the biggest, most-charged, battle in a national struggle. On one hand there is Britain's urgent need for renewable energy, on the other the fear that swaths of countryside will disappear beneath rectangles of dark silicon. "The national policy position assumes these things should happen," says the planning barrister Hashi Mohamed, who is acting on behalf of objectors to the scheme. But this is not to say that solar facilities should be built in any circumstances. With Botley West, the question is not only one of planning considerations, but also the way it is funded - and for whose benefit it is being built.