9) We can build our new homes on ‘brownfield’ land Under the advice of Richard Rogers’ Urban Taskforce, the government committed itself to building most homes on land that has already been developed and is now derelict, ‘brownfield’ as opposed to ‘greenfield’ development. Now, in London and other major cities, homes are being crammed into every available space that falls vacant. The BBC reports ‘garden grabbing’: ‘a rash of flats and new houses replacing gardens in high-price areas.’ (6) Shame-faced at their own role in this reinvention of Victorian overcrowding, the CPRE has amended its support for ‘brownfield development’, but still thinks this can be done without overcrowding (7).
10) Urban regeneration is the answer Britain is overwhelmingly a suburban country. Most people live in the suburbs. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, supports those campaigning to save the countryside from sprawl. That is because he wants to keep London densely populated to increase both his political and revenue base. To achieve that he has forced through lots of gardenless, dormitory-style flats, some unfortunately signposted as ‘key-worker housing’. And though newer immigrants naturally need to keep close to job prospects, Livingstone cannot prevent the ‘counter-urban cascade’ of people leaving London for the suburbs. While five per cent of England’s population live in rural areas and nine per cent live in the ‘urban core’, 43 per cent live in the suburbs and another 23 per cent live in suburban/urban areas.
11) More social housing is the answer A few people have looked at the shortfall in new homes and concluded that the decline is due to less council housing. That is not quite true. In the mid-Eighties, the private sector took up the slack, and in the Sixties, both boomed. It should not matter whether homes are public sector or private, but there is good reason to distrust the call for more social housing. Those who call for more council housing do so because they want to keep control over people, and do not trust them to make their own choices about where to buy. The green lobby supports council housing in the same way that the gentry supported almshouses for the poor - to keep them securely locked up, away from the toffs’ country houses.
12) New homes are ugly Even very intelligent people fall for this line. Considering just how big Cultural Studies is in our universities, you might have thought that somebody would have learned its basic lesson: most so-called aesthetic judgements are nothing but class snobbery dressed up as ‘taste’. Nearly every single house in Britain is a box. Much-prized Georgian terraces are boxes. Anti-growth campaigners like to show slides of urban developments from the skies, to make us all look like ants - but who lives in the skies? When people say that new homes are ugly, what they mean, but cannot bring themselves to say, is that they think of the people in them as being ugly.
13) Ireland’s new homes are especially ugly Ireland’s recent building boom is often cited as an example of what can go wrong. Those Irishmen’s homes are ugly, people say. What they mean is: ‘Wasn’t it cute when the Irish lived in little cottages with peat roofs, instead of those hateful McMansions?’ Why don’t they knock on a door and tell the person inside that his house is ugly, and see how they get on?
14) The CPRE campaigns to protect rural England In a radio debate, Shaun Spiers of the CPRE challenged me. Surely, he asked, I would not want to see the New Forest developed? The New Forest was once thickly developed with Saxon homes, until William the Conqueror burnt them out, demanding the New Forest for his deer park. The wide-open spaces of the British countryside are the barren desert left after our forebears were ethnically cleansed from the land by the aristocracy. It is the aristocracy that still takes most of the seats on the CPRE council. The real purpose of the CPRE is to put limits on people’s aspirations, a function they see in the planning laws: a core function of the planning system is to serve the long-term public interest by preventing the fulfilment of our wants as individuals (8).
15) We need to look after the environment Of course we do, but the CPRE and other green campaigners have forgotten who the environment is for. They look after empty spaces, beetles and rare birds, but treat people as cattle to be herded into overcrowded sheds. The British countryside is not under threat, but housebuilding is. The grotesque shortage of homes for people to live in shows what happens when you leave the greens in charge of just one area of policymaking. Imagine what would happen if they were allowed to have their way with energy, food, transport and medicine.
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