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, big-box “discount stores” surrounded by vast expanses of tarmac parking, business parks, and other urban infrastructure is quite depressing.

Meanwhile historic market towns and villages are being assaulted by building-shaking “juggernauts” and endless “road-improvement schemes” – all of which supposedly facilitate the supposedly essential “economic growth” that is led and fed by a population explosion of commuter traffic, speeding white vans, and home delivery vehicles.

NONE OF THIS DISRUPTION WOULD BE NECESSARY IF WE LIVED IN OASIS-CITIES

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.