ENDANGERED SPACES

The storied landscape of ENGLAND – that “green and pleasant land” of yore – is being slowly buried by dreary box housing, retail parks, and endless “road improvements”.   A process aided and abetted by politicians soliciting “youth-votes” with promises to “solve the housing crisis” by doubling the rate of home-building, even if this means building on the (so-called) “green-belts”.

Building on cherished countryside is un-necessary, car ownership is un-necessary, and – grand heresy that it is to say so – home ownership is TOTALLY un-necessary. 

Anthony Rawdon-Havens

From an early age I abhorred the creeping expansion of dreary suburbia into the countryside. The thought of woodland, meadows, and wildlife habitats being relentlessly engulfed by nondescript housing estates, service roads, and other urban infrastructure is sad, if not depressing. Meanwhile historic market towns and villages are assaulted by building-shaking “juggernauts” and endless “road-improvement schemes” to facilitate “economic growth” led and fed by a population explosion of commuter traffic, white vans, and home delivery vehicles.

London – DEATH BY SPRAWL 

Tragically, because our towns and villages were built on and near good agricultural land, much of that is now buried under bland “suburban sprawl”.  London, built over a very fertile alluvial river basin, being a prime example.  A sad irony that, in becoming “Greater” London, it has annihilated the very reason for its being where it is – the good agricultural land which once nurtured it.