The death of the British countryside

[Dappy777]

I have lived in north Essex since 1998. When we moved here, this was a small village on the outskirts of a quiet market town. In the last ten years, it has been ruined. My local woods have been hacked down to make way for two huge new estates, and at the other end of the village a second giant housing estate has been built. Now we've been told the fields in the centre of the village are going to be built on as well. The traffic is so bad that the country lanes, which were meant to take the odd tractor and a few cars, now have the sort of congestion you'd expect on the M25. The main road into town is also having 500 new houses built along it. That road is choked with traffic now, so what the hell is it going to be like when 500 extra cars are added?

This beautiful weather has really brought it home to me. My sister lives in a village 30 miles from here, and it's exactly the same where she is. In fact, it's worse. Everywhere I go they are jamming more and more disgusting rabbit hutch 'houses' on top of one another. Instead of bird song, all you hear is the drone of cars and the screeching and backfiring of idiot boy racers. I think we really are living through the death of the British countryside. There will still be fields and trees, of course, but the countryside as I knew it will soon be gone forever.

What sickens me is that I know the left get a kick out of all this. They seem to think that everyone in the countryside is a rich, fox-hunting 'Tory' in a big mansion. In reality, the vast majority of so-called 'nimbys' are just ordinary people who've worked hard and desperately want a bit of peace and quiet. My sister has devoted 30 years to the NHS, as has her husband. They've slogged their guts out to buy a little semi-detached house in a village. Now that village is being destroyed around them.

Is it just here in the south east? Or is this happening in other parts of these islands?

What's so bad about plastic grass, paving, additional buildings and no trees?

Are you being sarcastic?

The list of what is so bad about these things would include increased flooding, increased ground level heat, irreversible loss of wildlife / biodiversity, soil degradation and loss of pollinators both of which we rely upon in the long term to generate food, increased fossil fuel consumption / greenhouse gas emissions, increased pollutants including airborne and microplastics.

The negative consequences all of these bring to human health and wellbeing as well as the substantial societal costs in economic terms is what's bad about it. It's not just an aesthetic choice.

Forgive my humourless response if you are being sarcastic, it's quite hard to tell these days.

We definitely do need more homes - and nice places to be. If you go to Barcelona, they have wonderful blocks of flats with pocket parks in the middle, shops and nurseries and doctors and so on on the ground floor on the outside, light filled airy rooms - they are really beautiful! I have stayed with friends who live there and the buildings are so nice to be in. They are built for Barcelona but we could build for here, couldn't we? It's not beyond us, is it?

I quite like the New London Vernacular style that's coming through but is it also suitable for families? I'm not sure. We need public transport and bike routes and services and childcare really nearby, and spaces for kids to be safe and explore, and a realistic accommodation for the reality of constant rain. We need mixed spaces - houses and flats and schools and a train station. Obviously I'm not the first person to think of this, so what is happening that we can't build the Britain we want? Why are we so helpless?

Intensive agriculture is already an industrial landscape with no space for nature in a lot of it.
Pesticides run off into our rivers, soil isn’t protected properly, hedgerows and trees are torn up due to large machinery being unable to negotiate traditional sized fields.
Obviously not all farms but many are.

It does feel like we’re helpless. Like we just have to accept whatever big companies magnanimously offer us. I like the sound of the buildings in Spain, that’s just what we need: more medium-high rise, but with large, spacious flats and integrated, high quality facilities.

@Alexandra2001 me too . No we had shotloads of it when we lived in Denmark and it didn’t look ugly

The British dream isn’t a flat

Personally I think we need to remove private profit from the housing market and in doing so, progressively deflate it. It should be financially punitive to own/manage multiple homes. Home ownership should be contingent upon being mainly resident in the country. The rental market (which does need to exist) should be completely socialised. This would be a drastic change that couldn't happen within a short timeframe but I think should be a long term goal.

I have a friend, and she's a good person, a nice person and works hard. So this isn't about hating landlords - we're all motivated to do what is financially best for ourselves and our families.

She owns 2 homes in the UK whilst not resident in the country. She's a fair landlord but charges the market rate, obviously - the homes are an investment to her. But the system that makes it financially sensible/rewarding for her to behave in this way is essentially propping up rental prices and siphoning her tenants' (who are representative of huge swathes of the population) money to her mortgage lenders (with her taking her cut). That's how the system works currently and essentially it benefits shareholders who may not even circulate their wealth in our country. The consequences of this system are disastrous - it's the reason why its profitable to pave over the countryside to construct endless unaffordable low quality homes. It's the reason why countless properties in high demand areas such as London are empty and owned by overseas investors. I think it's even a contributing factor to the reason even why we have such a high waste throw away culture - because nothing remotely compares to the cost of housing. It's the reason councils can't afford anything - because all the money is being spent on social housing. It's the reason for large-scale social problems including chronic / generational underemployment, social unrest - because huge sections of society can try as hard as they like but will never achieve secure housing.

If we properly phased out second/multiple home ownership, took the money out of the housing market and resocialised rental housing - society would be vastly improved on multiple domains. And the public purse would save a fortune. People don't want to do it because they don't want to lose all the money they've put into their own house. Which I understand but it's an illusion because as it stands the essential value of having a really expensive house is being able to exchange it for another really expensive house. Houses should never have been allowed to become investments.

I live in North Kent and it's happening here too. The fields we had behind where we live are currently being turned into a 750 house estate. Just to clarify, we don't live in the countryside, but on the edge of a town (Sittingbourne) and we are gutted. It is a really difficult one because while I do understand that people need homes I am also so very aware of how nature depleted this country has already become and how vital green spaces are for people's well being, physical and mental health - which they have now taken away from the local community. Families were always out walking there, now there's nobody. And, I don't believe for one second that the property developers give two shits about people needing homes, this is all about money. And you know, they could mitigate a fraction of this building by putting some wildlife friendly areas in there somewhere, green spaces that work for people and pollinators, but they just pre-plant all of the front gardens with a monoculture of waxy leaved hedges and stick a bit of turf in the only (small) communal green space. The amount of trees and hedgerows they have chopped down in order to do this is sickening. About half a mile away they have been making plans for an additional 2,500 house development. On the other side of town they are currently fighting proposals for a development of 8,400 homes. All of this building will double the size of this own in a few years. And for anybody local who knows this area and the sort of traffic gridlock we've already got, well it's just a disaster. We also have one of the lowest ratios of GPs to patients in the whole country - even if they build doctor's surgeries are they confident of actually finding medical staff to run them, or are they just ticking a box? They can provide the building but they don't actually have to be responsible for getting it running, they can just fuck off with their thousands of pounds, it's somebody else's problem.

I live in South London. Looking at a map from 1900 tells me that my house is on what used to be a field. People moan about housing costs being ridiculous, and having no where to live…. More housing needs to be built.

🙄

Should have added, the "house as an investment" model we currently have also deeply embeds inequality and class division. It fundamentally benefits mortgage lenders, property lenders and those who already have the means to invest in multiple homes they don't need - whereas every other person who pays rent, a mortgage or tax is disadvantaged by the system.

"Right to Buy" is the worst political decision ever made in this country, I actually think worse than Brexit. Madness that it is still happening - for all the homes being built in the countryside we are stilling selling off social housing year on year, at the same time as councils pay an absolute fortune in rent to private landlords in the form of UC. Economically insane.

Do you think the loss of that field matters? If not, how many field would need to be lost for it to matter? Do you think we need to protect the natural world? Do we need to be able to produce most of our own food in this country? Do people need access to nature?

What is your area like now? Are there trees, green spaces, shops, transport? Are there houses attractive and well-built? Do you think any of this matters?

All fair enough points, but where do you live, how much land per person is taken up in your housing, how many children do you have and where will they live as adults....?

Loving people with large houses and gardens in beautiful country villages declaring other people can simply live in flats or converted high st shops.

As it happens I do live in a flat with a shared garden and am perfectly happy with that, but why do you think others shouldn't have what you have?

Well it was lost some 120 years ago and it’s not really something people get too exercised about. To answer your question, houses and flats are packed in. People have no or a very small garden. But we do have some lovely green spaces in South London. Landscape changes over time and no one likes change. But people adapt.

@Ginmonkeyagain you would have to ask Kemi Badenoch on that-! I agree with you , I saw someone objecting the other week that they were building a smallish new development on the edge of their ‘suburban village’ and it was going to have a mix of full ownership , shared ownership and a bit of social housing- god forbid that your own children might be greatful for the shared ownership/social housing. I do think consideration has to be made with regard to access, schools, medical etc -and I agree that some areas are much worse hit than others , the problem is though you can only develop where landowners are prepared to sell for the right price and in areas you think people will be prepared to buy.

There isn’t a lack of housing available to buy but a lack of housing that people can afford to buy in areas they ‘want’ to live and that has the convenience and facilities relatively close by that they expect. - when you go on to the property thread on mumsnet - you find that given the amount they are spending many people’s requirements are very very specific - and in some cases basically narrows it down to about 5 streets in the area they live already. Yet if you search within 5 miles there are often 10 to 20 houses that kind of tick most boxes on the market. The big issue is affordability in many areas, particularly southern half of UK and the in demand areas in midlands, wales and the north.

i would like to see a return to DIYSO - Tony Blair had it in but it was simply too popular and totally hated by the house builders. We bought a 1 bed Edwardian flat in Crouch End on it when I was pregnant on 1998. Basically it’s shared ownership on the open market - not just new builds- with limits depending on region/area. In our case there was a 50% limit too -we couldn’t go below that.
sold it 2 years later when son was too big to share our room- had 5 potential buyers with a week at 50% - sold for £12k more than we bought - split 50/50 with housing association. Shared freehold too . It was a good scheme.

So it was okay for you to move there but not for anyone else new ?

No i'm not, i'm reply to the statement that this is somehow a Left/Labour thing...

Tory and Lab have used the term Nimby to criticise anyone who objects to house building or anything else...

We have voted in successive Govt's that see immigration as the solution to all our problems, 1m extra in the last full year of the Tories, under Labour that was 220k... those extra 800k people need housing, even if they are only here temporarily, they have to live somewhere.

Solar only works if it is large in scale the infrastructure ie cabling to the network is only economical if the generating source is very large & as far as i'm aware Miliband, who incidentally, i have zero time for, isn't building a single Solar farm & his/Lab plans for rented EPC changes is beyond stupid.

On Lincolnshire, 84% of all farmland there is considered Arable, so that leaves 16% that can be taken without affecting food production... yes i know its not quite that simple but it gives an idea of the amount of land in the county that is not used for direct food production but yes agree, it would be stupid to build on the 84%.

It all matters very much and it breaks my heart to see the mindless destruction of the countryside in the name of "economic growth" but given the present levels of migration, which as i said, we have, as a country, voted for... whats the alternative? there isn't the so called brown field available to met Labours plans, let alone the real demand.

Let’s go back to ploughing with horses.

Yep Labour are promoting building houses. The target is high.

Yes of course they do, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask whether the changes are actually for the better or the worse. Or whether there are alternatives.

I imagine that you probably do have shops, schools and public transport. Houses built in 1900 also tend to be reasonably spacious. The new developments are hundreds and hundreds of houses with no school places, no public transport, no jobs, no shops.

What is ‘economic’ depends on what model you use. If you rely on the market to deliver everything and of course make a profit, then many public goods (quality house building, solar installations) are not economic. That just means we should consider delivering them in a different way.

The Labour target is actually lower than the Conservatives had in their manifesto, 1.5m v 1.6m

I grew up in a midlands village - it's in the doomsday book thatched cottages and country pub and church - about mile plus from outskirts of nearest town. I was there are village has housing expansion in 70s and my parents couldn't afford the town prices. It had a new estate added when I was a child - few conversions few new builds as well.

Very few I grew up with in village live there - as house prices are so steep. There is a massive housing shortage.

However in 20 years since I left everywhere been built up - that mile got down to a few fields - that got sold for a new school and housing estate - there now one asking for permission other side as well. Getting in and out has huge traffic jams and the sewage system and other infracture needs expansion. My sibling are in HA housing recently built on green fields otherside of town.

So I see what you are saying but at same time know housing is very much needed as we aren't building enough and haven't for decades.

Plus it's not peopele having kids - we've been under the replacement level of fertlity since I was born in late 70s - number dying each year set very soon to be more than number born - but immigration means we'll increase the population by millions - but then we have many jobs to fill.

Badgers and foxes don't WANT to be seen, that's the problem with this argument. Being around humans causes stress and sickliness in animals. City foxes might be "thriving" in number but they're full of mange and disease from living so close to each other and eating rubbish and catching parasites from domestic pets. If they had the land to live on in peace, you wouldn't see them. They've been driven onto pavement.