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Abolish the Green Belt, there is no City of London any more

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There is something very quaint about being asked to draft a policy for a new city, rather like writing up the ‘future for steam power’, or ‘what next for patriarchy?’ The truth is that British people do not live in cities, but suburbs. Over time, better roads, cars, trains and trams have increased the distance people travel to work. That in turn has let them spread out over the countryside. The effect is quite marked. Population densities have fallen over time, so that most of us live much less close to our neighbours, than our grandparents did to theirs.

That fool Lewis Mumford thought that we always did live in cities, and always will (The City in History, 1961). But the link between Babylon and today’s built-up areas is just a word, ‘City’ that tells us almost nothing. The nineteenth century saw the creation of the City that we recognise as such, the industrial city, whose template still persists today, though it, too no longer describes the way people live.

In the nineteenth century it made sense to divide the land between the town and the country. Industry had to be concentrated. Labourers’ wages did not allow big commutes. They lived at the pithead, or by the factory. Also, every acre of countryside was farmed extensively – to feed horses, mules and men. Progressives knew that the antagonism between Town and Country was not just a technical necessity, but a trap that held people back. They looked forward to the day when the divide of Town and Country was abolished.

Over time the nineteenth century city has been superceded. In the interwar years working class people bought up cheap land in Kent and Essex and made their own ‘plotlands’ that grew into towns like Pitsea, Jaywick Sands and Canvey Island (see Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All, 2003). Or they moved to the new ribbon developments growing up alongside main roads.

The ruling elite always hated the way that the plebs kept moving further out of town, slowly breaking down the boundary between Town and Country. They had relied on the aristocracy to enforce the monopoly over land, but impoverished, they had leapt at the chance to sell up under the 1882 Settled Lands Act – leaving an opening for ordinary people to buy land to farm or live on.

Today’s Green Belt policies are an outcome of the apoplectic reaction of the Tory Shires to ‘ribbon development’. The (then) Council for the Preservation of Rural England was founded in 1926 to halt the ‘blight’. It lobbied for a Green Belt around London (1983) and across the country (1955).

The Green Belt has been a huge problem for house building. Under the 1947 Planning Act, ownership of land is no longer enough to be able to build there. Instead you have to get permission from the authorities. In areas called ‘Green Belt’ around towns and cities permission is generally refused.

In the long run, the policy is like Canute, trying to hold back the waves. Farmland is so productive by comparison to 1900 that we need much less of it grow our food on. Farmers are selling up. Land is going begging. Naturally, more people want to spread out into the countryside. In time they will. Policy makers call it the ‘counter-urban cascade’.

But in the meantime, the policy of hemming us into the cities is straining against that positive trend. Tory shires and urban Stalinists are united in their wish to hang onto the old geographic division. Ken Livingstone does not want his Council Charge payers to drift off to Essex – walled into the City they are the source of his power. Nor do the Bufton Tuftons want to share their precious Home Counties stockbroker belt with common oiks.

Last month Gypsies built a camp near Shipston-on-Stour in Warwickshire (it became pressworthy because Tessa Jowell has a home there). Though the local Tory councillor has tried to lead a mob against them, the Gypsies own the land, which they bought from a farmer. They have put in a septic tank and put up fences. They are just people trying to deal with the shortage of places to live.

What they do not have is ‘planning permission’ – the say so of the high and mighty town councillors. Instead of being reviled, the Warwickshire Gypsies should be championed for what they are – leaders of a rebellion against the planning laws. Their illegal land-right squatting is the natural reaction of people who have been barred from building homes legally.

We should abolish the Green Belt. It is no help to anyone. There is no shortage of land. Nine tenths of Britain is not built up. Lifting the artificial constraints on growth will let people build where they want. As people move towards lower density living, and conurbations extend along communication lines and coasts, it will become obvious that the City has long been superceded.

Already it makes little sense to talk about ‘London’ as if it had a common identity. Since 1965, in fact, it has not been London, but the Greater London Conurbation. Right now, Tory candidate Boris Johnston, canvassing in Enfield and Finchley, is taking advantage of the fact that Ken Livingstone has ignored the populous outer boroughs because he is fixated on the tourist/retail/financial/media/governmental complex that is inner London.

Understood fully, the Greater London Conurbation extends from Brighton in the South to Oxford in the West and Cambridge in the North East. It is not one city but a part of the new combination of dispersed living alongside concentrated cultural and administrative centres. The Green Belt legislation is an anachronism that is stopping us from building where we need to. We should abolish it and get used to the fact that there is no city called London.

James Heartfield is a director of Audacity.org. His new book Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance is available to buy directly from his website at www.heartfield.org . He is debating the Campaign to Protect Rural England on 24 April in Bristol at the Architecture Centre, and on 22 May at the Manchester Society of Architects.

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This might be of interest:

Dolan Cummings - Sat, 26/04/2008 - 16:43

This might be of interest: Roger Scruton argues that environmentalism is conservative, not left-wing, and attacks suburbanisation accordingly.

'The most important man-made environmental problem in this country [the USA] is that presented by the spread of the suburbs.'

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A Hertfordshire yokel looks

Tom Addiscott - Tue, 22/04/2008 - 14:16

A Hertfordshire yokel looks askance at the Heartfield hegemony. What happened to my backyard?

Here in Hertfordshire we're wondering if James Heartfield was serious about abolishing the Green Belt. We have been worrying for some time that if house-building is not carefully controlled we could soon coalesce with north London and become the London Borough of Hertfordshire. James Heartfield lives in London, and his proposals suggest that this is just what he wants. In fact, he seems to want the London Boroughs of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and so on too, all part of a greater London conurbation covering about 7000 square miles of the South-East. Us yokels are watching him with fascinated horror, rather as the Tibetans must have watched Mao-tse-Tung in 1950. Could the Chinese hegemony in Tibet be matched by a London hegemony in South-East England? (Or a Heartfield hegemony?)

Heartfield says he wants to get rid of the planning laws, which he described last month as 'the toff's barricade against the great unwashed'. He talks merrily of the counter-urban cascade, people spreading happily from the cities into the countryside, and presumably from London out into Hertfordshire. But wait a minute, Hertfordshire has already taken in substantial numbers of refugees from London and accommodated them in large new towns at Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead. We've also taken in quite a lot of people from other parts of the country. Just listen to the accents you hear round here. You hear Lancashire as often as you hear real 'arfordshire. And look at the population change. Since the 1950s, Berkhamsted, where I lived as a boy, and Harpenden, where I live now, have both trebled in population, a trend probably matched in much of southern Hertfordshire. So is abolishing the Green belt and letting London people build even more houses wherever they wish really going to result in lower density living?

We have got problems even without the Heartfield proposals. The government seems to want large increases in housing numbers that will bring Hatfield closer to St Albans and St Albans closer to Hemel Hempstead. The amount of open land (not built-up) between the east side of Hatfield and the west side of Hemel Hempstead has halved since 1950, meaning that the new houses will bring a real risk of coalescence. If this happens, it will mean a 15 mile east-west conurbation about 20 miles north of London. We simple Hertfordshire folk don't think that's very good idea and it's obviously more likely to happen if you abolish the planning laws. So far as we can make out, much of the point of those laws was to prevent urban coalescence.

The planning laws also aimed to restrict ribbon development along main roads, which we thought was a good idea, but Heartfield seems to see this as one reason for scrapping them. He presumably wants to replicate London driving conditions (30 mph limit etc) right out into the countryside.

In Hertfordshire we tend to see the planning laws not so much as keeping out the great unwashed as protecting the populace against the follies of the government. That's certainly so in Harpenden, where I live. According to the regional plan, we are going to get 700 new houses on our north side, contrary to the advice of the local planning officer. I can hear Heartfield accusing me of being a NIMBY, but there are good reasons for concern.

The development would take Harpenden up to the county boundary with Bedfordshire and closer to Luton, which is showing clear signs of wanting to expand south around its airport. Another 400 houses are threatened to the west of us and we seem to be at risk of becoming part of a large conurbation centred on Luton Airport. This is just the sort of thing the planning laws are there to prevent.

That's not the only problem. The extra houses would mean about 1000 new children, many of whom will be of secondary school age but, as you guessed, no increase in the town's school capacity is planned. More hospital capacity will be needed in the area, but it is being cut at the moment. The new owners would have about 1000 cars, adding to the serious existing traffic problems, including virtual gridlock on occasions. It just doesn't add up, particularly if you add in the fact that water is getting short in the area. It looks a chaotic prospect, but it's going to be a lot worse if Heartfield gets his way with the planning laws.
I'm not just a yokel, I'm an agricultural yokel. And I'm not impressed with Heartfield's idea of letting people flood out of London and build houses on our agricultural land. I doubt if he was around during and after the Second World War, when people were really short of food. I was. One reason we were short was that in the inter-war years smart London people more or less ignored farming as of no importance because we could always import our food from the colonies or North America. They gave no thought to food security - until Hitler's U-boats started sinking our food ships in the Atlantic. I hope there will not be another war of that scale and I don't expect one, but I still think we would be very ill advised to build too extensively on farmland. We just do not know what the future holds, other than that the UK population will probably increase and we shall need more food. And we need to take the current global food supply problems as a warning of the inherent instabilities in the system.
Heartfield says, quite correctly, that farmland is vastly more productive than in 1900 but he does not say why, and the reason is crucial to this discussion. The greater productivity is mainly attributable to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer manufactured by the Haber-Bosch process. The population of the world can no longer be fed without this vital commodity, but it is currently under two threats, one local to the UK and the other global.
The local threat comes from the green/ organic lobby. This is an increasingly powerful group which has influence with the government, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is high on its hate-list. It would like much more of the nation's food to be grown by organic methods without nitrogen fertilizer than at the moment, but, if you take nitrogen fertilizer out of the equation, productivity will gradually decline towards the 1900 level. It won't happen suddenly because some of the fertilizer nitrogen used has stayed in the soil in chaff, stubble and roots and is stored in the soil organic matter, from which it will gradually be released by soil microbes for the crop's benefit. But, even in the short term, organic farming needs more land to produce a given amount of food than farming using nitrogen fertilizer. This means that it will be unwise to let Londoners build on too much of our agricultural land until the organic debate has been decided.
The global threat arises simply from the fact that manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer needs a great deal of energy, usually from natural gas, and energy is going to get scarcer and more expensive. One aspect of this is that because the world is now collectively dependant on nitrogen fertilizer, (yes, just like an addict is dependant on heroin), we are in due course going to have to set aside energy for nitrogen fertilizer production to prevent mass starvation. And nitrogen fertilizer is going to get scarcer and more expensive in the rich world, introducing serious uncertainties about our future food supplies. We would be mad to think that we can carry on using nitrogen fertilizer as we have in the last forty years. And we would be mad to build too extensively on agricultural land.

Here in Hertfordshire, we've just heard about a new book that's been published. It's called, "That's Bollocks! Urban Legends, Conspiracy Theories and Old Wives' Tales." Us yokels know that we ought to doff our caps to toffs like Mr Heartfield and the Bufton Tuftons. (God bless the squire and his relations. And help us all to know our stations.) So we wouldn't be rude enough to suggest that the book has any connection with Mr Heartfield's proposals. But we wouldn't be human if it didn't cross our minds.

Mud in your eye, Mr Heartfield! Arr.

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