Britain’s delusions about the green belt cause untold misery

IF ANYTHING deserves the label “wasteland”, this place does. Pylons and tangles of bramble high as houses tower over a lonely oil drum and a collapsed metal fence. In the distance planes approaching Stansted airport whine; refrigerator units at a nearby food-processing factory hum. Set in the frozen mud is a mosaic of industrial detritus, bits of brick and pipe, beer cans and a discarded condom wrapper. A jaunty yellow arrow informs passers-by that this scraggy parcel of Harlow, in Essex, is a public right-of-way.

Notwithstanding the condom wrapper, there are few signs that locals get any enjoyment from it. Given its good road connections and the chronic shortage of local housing, a sensible jurisdiction would make it available for a couple of blocks of flats, or a few dozen homes with gardens. A study by the local council last year found that protecting it serves no discernible purpose. Developing it would cause Harlow neither to sprawl, nor to annex another town, nor to lose its character. Yet protected this wasteland shall remain; a useless eyesore trapped in the insensitive, crushing grip of London’s green belt.

Such doughnuts encircle most of Britain’s big cities. Some of the land they imprison, especially around Manchester, Leeds and south London, is beautiful. But often this is protected by designations of “area of outstanding natural beauty” or “ancient woodland”. And much of the rest is unlovely, inaccessible or both: intensive agricultural land, horse paddocks, endless golf courses and pointlessly empty parcels like this one in Harlow. For another example, take the chunk of the green belt that lies directly to the north of the town’s main station. A few flat fields bordered by a thundering road and a supermarket, this too serves no aesthetic or environmental purpose and, a mere 30-minute train ride from central London, would be ideal for houses.

Such development is desperately needed. Britain’s broken and cruel housing market may be the country’s most grotesque inequity. In 1997 it took a middle-income household three years to save up a deposit to buy a house; today it takes 20 years. Ever more Britons are consigned to properties that cramp, impoverish or otherwise limit them. Measures to solve the crisis without opening the green belts, including those in the government’s new white paper on housing, deregulate land good for a few thousand houses here and there. Merely loosening the corsets would mean millions, the order of magnitude at which any solution lies. Barney Stringer, a regeneration expert, reckons liberalising 60% of the green belt within 2km (1.2 miles) of a railway station would create room for 2m homes. Alan Mace of the London School of Economics suggests such numbers could be reached by opening up corridors along big transport routes, such as the London-Cambridge road on which Harlow lies. New “garden cities” on these arteries, like Ebbsfleet in Kent, are part of the answer.

Just one thing stands between a housing-starved Britain and these wise proposals: politics. Most voters would benefit, directly or indirectly, from the construction of millions of new houses on unremarkable but conveniently located parts of the green belts. Yet elections do not work like that. The liminal zones tend to contain lots of NIMBYish, not-quite-rural and not-quite-urban bellwethers, which matter disproportionately. And the pathology extends far beyond their borders. A survey by the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2015 found that 62% of urban dwellers want to protect the green belt. Reason barely comes into it.

Which is no coincidence, because Britain’s relationship with the countryside is emotional. Blame the Victorian bourgeoisie, who built vast, hellish metropolises where they lived in increasing material comfort, wistfully recalling rural life. They read pastoral novels and pasted vegetal designs on the walls of brick villas modelled after remote castles and sylvan cottages. They built railway lines that took them just far enough out of the cities to feel they were experiencing rustic life. In this spirit their children and grandchildren would create the green belt.

Their instincts live on. Britain has plenty of countryside for those who want to live there, as anyone who has flown over it will attest. But over 90% of its citizens (more than in any other big Western country) opt to dwell in towns and cities. They seem to be in denial. Much of the country’s aesthetic and entertainment culture offers them seductive morsels of rural life. Hit television programmes like “The Great British Bake Off” and “Springwatch” constitute one example. New housing estates are pastiches of village architecture, all small windows, frilly gables and pitched roofs. The National Trust, a charity dedicated to preserving old houses and attractive landscapes, has more members than all the political parties put together.

The political deadlock behind the housing crisis will only be broken when Britain comes to terms with its urban character. That might mean better valuing city gardens and parks, which support more biodiversity than heavily agricultural land. It might also mean a more unapologetically urban architecture. Modernist developments like Abode in Cambridgeshire and New Islington in Manchester—bold shapes, big windows, buildings at ease with themselves—show the way.

Ill fares the land

Such notions may sound frivolously middle-class. But if they help budge the politics of the crisis, they are anything but. For the pain it causes is no less acute for being lived out quietly, in private. Think of those left homeless, those who cannot afford an annual holiday, those condemned to horrible commutes; of those couples without the money to move in together (or to separate); of the young adults unable to live near the apprenticeships or jobs they want. Perhaps such victims are too diverse to organise, march and make their voices heard. But their misery is real and visceral. And all for so much golf course, sod and bramble.