"Little boxes on the hillside..."

For many years, people have complained not only about the mediocre quality and monotonous uniformity of the houses being built in this country, but also their decreasing size. This was always blamed on the greed of developers. Over the last few years, however, there have been some radical changes in planning policy which have gone largely unnoticed, but which give official backing to the building of even smaller homes. Take our borough as an example. There is now a policy in the Local Plan requiring a planning density of at least 30 dwellings per hectare increasing to 50 per hectare in town centres, including the centres of small market towns such as ours. This is about twice the housing density that was normal say 30 years ago. The reason for this is that there is strong resistance on the part of the government and indeed many of the people living in villages and small towns to any residential development in the wider countryside or, particularly, in ‘the green belt' around them. This resistance has an almost religious fervour to it in our ‘green' age. Green belt, of course, consists of areas of land around towns and cities designed to do various things - to prevent urban sprawl, to prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another, to preserve the identity of market towns and villages and to encourage recycling of derelict urban land. But agricultural land which is not green belt cannot be so used either other than for agricultural or leisure purposes. And so, according to official figures, we have a situation where only about 12% of the land in the UK is used for urban purposes i.e villages, towns and cities. In other words, in excess of 90% of the population (by my estimation) lives in just over 12% of the land, because very few people actually live in houses in the open country itself. This density is set to increase. As we know, the pressure for homes is increasing with people living longer and more families breaking down. Granted the resistance to building on open land, the only possibility is to build homes at a greater density on the land within the existing development boundaries. Obviously, to do this, the homes have to be significantly smaller and of course parking areas are restricted - which is in line with another new government policy. The rationale is that if you do not provide parking spaces for people, then they will be discouraged from owning cars! In the continued absence of a decent public transport system, of course, it will simply mean that we will have even more on-street parking and therefore even more congestion. But not only are the living conditions in new developments to be more cramped but, as we know, not enough houses are being built and so prices have gone up as a consequence - and with them the price of development land. And so back garden development is becoming more common - two or more dwellings will share the same space that was occupied by only one. It is often worthwhile even to knock down a house in order to replace it with a development of several much smaller ones. This is fine for the original owners, who will probably move away into a more spacious house on the proceeds, but I cannot help thinking that this is not good from a sociological point of view. And the greater density of housing in our villages and towns will change their character permanently and make them far less attractive - the opposite consequence to that intended by the maintenance of the green belt. Now I am all in favour of preventing, for example, our small town from merging with Birmingham. But development outside its present boundary, if properly planned, need not have this effect. It would no doubt deeply upset hairshirt environmentalists who believe that the countryside should never be built on and also those who already live close to the open country-side and who don't want development in their back yard. It would however, release land for decent-sized dwellings and mean that our successors could enjoy similar living standards to those which we have had and not a modern version of the conditions suffered by our ancestors in the back to back houses at the time of the industrial revolution. We need not a doctrinaire, but a pragmatic approach, which does not cramp people into smaller and smaller boxes, and at the same time preserves the essential identity of our towns and villages. I am sure that it is not beyond our ability to do this.

 Home    Caro Diario   Philosophy   Who am I?      Links