New belts, new edges
As Labour start their housebuilding crusade I recall writing Outskirts, on the strange story of the green belt, and whether optimism or pessimism will win out
In a Guardian article yesterday David Rudlin, urban design director at BDP, talked about how plans by the new Labour government to build 1.5m new homes would take land twice the size of Milton Keynes across England. I live in Milton Keynes, and I have to say, spreak all over the country, that really is not very much. There was a lot of talk about councils taking ‘confident bites’ out of the green belt, from low quality ‘grey belt’ land.
When I wrote Outskirts, my history of the green belt, almost a decade ago, I looked at the issues facing the green belt, and felt a sense of paralysis. Yes, much of the green belt is actually poor quality land left to rural dereliction, due to the land
-owners not looking after it or valuing it, because they were not able to sell it for development. I grew up facing on to the green belt on a council estate on the edge of Croydon, and that experience has stayed with me, that strange landscape where the urban becomes rural with a hard edge.
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