If you’re at a loose end this Christmas can I recommend that you load up Google Earth and take a flight over southern and eastern England? What you see may surprise you. The myth says that we live in a built up and overcrowded island. The reality, especially in the east of England, is a vista of thousands of square miles of prairie-like fields with barely a settlement to be seen. The reason that England may sometimes feel overcrowded is because we are one of the most hemmed-in nations on earth, with 90 percent of us living on just 9 percent of England’s land area.
As a consequence, as Martin Durkin says, we “are stuffed into towns and cities like battery-farmed chickens.” The consequence of this stuffing is unaffordable property prices and a deepening housing crisis. If I had one cure for the housing crisis it would be, “It’s all about Land, stupid.”
One of the principal obstacles to sustainable housing growth are the 14 green belts that surround many of our towns and cities and comprise 13% of England’s area. They were set up with the best of intentions, to prevent sprawl, but in some places they are strangling the very cities they were designed to protect, leading to a massive imbalance between homes and jobs and causing thousands of people to “jump” the green belt every day, at huge cost to their nerves and the environment. In Cambridge where I live, 45 000 people have to commute across the green belt every day because they cannot afford to live in the city. Last week a house in my road, a modest Victorian terrace with a loft extension sold for almost half a million pounds. The consequence of this level of unaffordability is that many Cambridge colleges and high-tech firms are unable to recruit the right people, causing immense harm to the national economy. The green belts restrict development, push up land prices and have contributed to the UK having the smallest homes in Western Europe.
One of the aims of the green belts was to open up the countryside to recreation. In fact less than 2% of the green belt comprises accessible country parks. Much of the green belt is devoted to intensive farming with no amenity value or public access. As an example, take a drive along the M25 clockwise from Heathrow to Dartford. Is there any reason why London should not expand up to the M25 along much of this stretch of motorway, with green lungs to allow access beyond the city? But the green belts have also caused the loss of amenity land within the cities they were meant to protect. The brownfield first policy means that derelict sites within the city are almost always built upon rather than turned into parks and open spaces. The Borough of Islington, for example, contains almost no open space. If the green belts in London, Oxford and Cambridge were rolled back, perhaps replaced pro-rata with land beyond their present boundaries, it would allow more open spaces to be created within the cities and for sustainable development to take place.
The green belt is a 1930s concept that is no longer fit for purpose. Interestingly, one of the planners behind the green belt concept was Sir Patrick Abercrombie who also founded the CPRE in 1926, now, along with the National Trust, one of the most virulent campaigners against the much-needed planning reforms set out in the National Planning Policy Framework. As Martin Durkin argues, the green belts were essentially an act of class war, a conspiracy of the intellectuals and land owning aristocracy to prevent the stinking lower orders from spreading beyond the confines of the city. The countryside campaigners who oppose the NPPF are essentially part of this same tradition. It’s time for a re-think on the green belt.
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Colin Wiles writes about
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David Lawrenson,
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Readers' comments (14)
F451 | 19/12/2011 10:19 am
It is not time to roll back the Green Belt - it is time to make it wider.
It is also time that the elite let go of the shackles placed upon us all that force us to sit in an office all day every day, when most of us only need to touch base, face-toface, every so often.
Instead of 'jumping the green belt' with the daily commute, using the new fangled idea to the UK called the internet could free the workers from so many wasted hours, restore their work-life balance, and meet our CO2 reduction targets all in one go.
The losers would be the transport companies of course, as the premium profit of commuter cattle will be lost, and of course perhaps our roads could be repaired and stay repaired, as well as being freer flowing and so help good arrive more swiftly and cheaply.
House prices could be stabalised as people could chose to work from where they could afford to live.
So that would give another group of losers - all those service workers who are present in our congested cities to feed the daily cattle - but surely they could instead find roles in productive work, or even something that fills their own aspirations better.
But of course, the true losers would be the financial sector, deprived of all the false and inflated markets that having such a large proportion of the workforce forced to pay inflated housing costs, service costs, utility premiums, commuting costs and the like. And then of course there is the fear that the last time the majority of the population had more free time they tended to use it to question the very basis of society and question the rule of the State. Now that would never do, would it.
The Green Belt may have been invented as a environmental protection measure, but now it symbolises the divide in society. The technology that we have had for so many years that removes the pressure cooker effect has not been deployed, simply for economic gain and control. So targeting the Green Belt as the issue is wrong, instead look as to why the obvious solution has not been implemented, then deal with that issue and save us all and the countryside in one action.
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Melvin Bone | 19/12/2011 12:17 pm
The house on your road will still be worth half a million with or without the greenbelt.
Would you consider moving out of Cambridge if they built on the greenbelt?
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Colin Wiles | 19/12/2011 12:57 pm
Melvin I think a sensible and extensive programme of urban extensions to Cambridge, with green corridors out into the countryside, would help to re-balance house prices in the City over a period of years. A long-term drop in prices relative to incomes would benefit everyone in the long run. No I wouldn't move out.
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John Locke | 19/12/2011 4:06 pm
A welcome article by Colin Wiles. Martin Durkin's article (which develops themes by the US academic Robert Bruegmann and British writer James Heartfield) correctly identifies the elite agenda that informed the creation of the 1947 system - the need to kettle-in the British working class within the cities - or the cattle-classes as F451 snobbishly terms them - which is sort of reminiscent of the Duke of Wellington who feared that the spread of the railways would only encourage the common people to travel around.
Truth is, we need much more freedom from planning to be able to experiment with all sorts of new types of living and settlements, as well as buidling homes and supporting the economy.
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Melvin Bone | 20/12/2011 8:41 am
What price of property do you think Cambridge needs?
Only I googled and found property for under £150,000 less than 3 miles from the city centre...
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Evan Owen | 20/12/2011 10:20 am
I went by train from Birmingham to Reading, hardly any development to be seen, not even electrification of the line.
What is all the fuss about?
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PlanB | 20/12/2011 10:27 am
We could ease the overcrowding of our cities if all the Tories were relocated to Doggerland - it seems perfect in location and name for them. Loads of Oil to waste, neither in Europe nor out of it, ancestorally pure and no poor people to get in the way.
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Anonymous | 20/12/2011 10:38 am
All valid points, Colin, and i woudl agree that we live in hemmed in cities with large expanses of countryside between them. However, we are objectively, the second most densely populated country in Europe after the Netherlands, with some 19% of our land already built on. While there may be an argument for some managed release of low quality green belt subject to certain criteria (such as a %age of high quality green space to be specified in any land release) there has to be a line drawn at some point, otherwise we'll just have a huge suburb spreading from pinner to birmingham, or new malden to poole.
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Alpha One | 20/12/2011 11:59 am
F451, your 'solution' ignores the fact that we need more homes, regardless of where they are.
If we build in cities we have to live in boxes, and homes in the country are more expensive because of the space they provide. If you make the green belts wider you only succeed in making the value of properties inside of it higher as space because even more premium, and the values of homes outside of it higher for the same reason.
If you want to build more properties on more of the land then you will decrease property values as space ceases to be a premium.
I agree with you on the working from home thing (although I'm not sure I'd trust any broadband provider to provide the security and stability of a LAN network in an office building). Perhaps companies could operate satelite offices in localities near where large numbers of their staff live, thus avoiding costly commutes. Ultimately it would save money as they could downsize the space in the city to a more affordable premises and run satelite offices at cheaper rates.
However, greenbelts are an antiquated idea that need serious reform to allow this country to grow. We have to accept the fact this island nation is growing and it needs room to expand.
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F451 | 20/12/2011 12:26 pm
Yes we need more homes, but they need not be more expensive.
I'd like to see 'green holes' growing in the middle of our cities and potentially growing arms out to the green belt. Ideally, there is no reason why some of the original London villages can't be recovered for instance as the pressure to all be in the centre is relieved.
I find your lack of trust of technology interesting Alpha. If BP can happily run teams globally through web-hosting, and complete multi£Bn projects remotely then I'm sure that there is huge potential for us to not all have to be cooped up in ever more congested urban hells.
People can be freed to live where they prefer, and matching their working and social preferences. Those who can not exist comfortably without being able to hear their neighbours pass wind and enjoy 24-hour society should be able to live in cities; all the way through to those who value peace and cleanliness should be able to live next door to Gavin.
We have the tools at our disposal to offer this choice and freedom. My point is that we are not being given the option - simply old arguments and failed solutions. Time to start asking why?
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John Locke | 21/12/2011 10:01 am
The wonderful thing about innovations in communication technology is that it encourages people to travel more. The more in touch we become with other people in the world, the more we want to meet them. Humans are wonderfully sociable. The misanthropes of the environmental movement seem intent upon re-creating feudal relations. Efficiencies brought about through improved communications (e.g. buying things on-line) will also allow us spare time to do other things - usually involving travel.
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Eric Blair | 21/12/2011 4:30 pm
The bit about commuting really leapt out for me, because I think it's terrible that so many of us have to do that in the first place, and the answer is probably to change the way many of us work. Our assumptions about bending the environment to our will, and our apparent right to do this, seem to cause more problems than they solve.
I certainly think creating more public green space is very important, and modern cities suffer from monumental levels of overcrowding. This doesn't always inspire decent behaviour, but suburban sprawl isn't the answer to our woes either.
The rise in UK property prices is part of our national fetish with home ownership, personal greed and lack of foresight. I still think that there should be land which cannot be built on. Certainly, the idea of uprooting ancient woodland and hedgerows (even cities have these!) and turning them into housing estates is unappealing and downright amoral.
You mention Eastern England and underpopulated areas. Settlements are built for many reasons, but not least because they follow economic activities. Agriculture is no longer as labour intensive as before, so communities don't spring up around that. There is no point living in the middle of a green desert, even if this superficially sounds like available real estate. It's a complex issue.
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F451 | 21/12/2011 4:53 pm
Eric has a point - perhaps future generations will build their homes around the out of town shopping malls as that is where the majority will work and shop.
Perhaps they may rename the mall a high street, and then put a no-build zone around the edge of the housing so that there is still some countryside to walk in too!
Alternatively - houses need to be redesigned to permit drive through for all facility to match the human travel lust and romance with the automobile!
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Melvin Bone | 22/12/2011 8:44 am
I commute. Not because I cannot afford to live where I work but because my partner works elsewhere and where we live is halfway.
Many people also commute by choice prefering to live away from towns and cities...
Commuting itself is not necessarily bad.
I like my commute.
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