To think England is too crowded

[toadworthy]

In my town on the South coast it really is chaos and getting worse all the time. Roads are a nightmare. There are never enough school places despite doubling the entry in all primaries. Soaring rents. Building sites all over.

AIBU to mind?
What's it like where you are?

SapphireStrange husband is from here. Life is pretty great, I like it a lot but rural Brazil wouldn't suit everyone. Where we live is a bit like the Outback of Australia which is why I said my son will be like Crocodile Dundee. We have low crime and everyone knows everyone else. Big cities are a different kettle of fish, but it's not at all like it was portrayed in school geography lessons. Even in it's current crisis state it is an amazing country. It is HUGE and has everything from tropical rainforest to snow and untouched tribes to towns that look like German villages. So depends what part you go, but I say it is well worth a visit.

I often read posts like "Neighbour having a barbeque and it's making my washing smell" or other neighbour threads and I do think, yup, y'all live in each other's pockets.

Yanbu. The roads are clogged, schools full, hospitals struggling. I don't know what the answer is, unless they start restricting immigration to a level that infrastructure can cope with.

Vote out

dodo

And ancient forests, fantastic building opportunities there

or improve the infrastructure giraffe

oh yeah

vote in btw

Well whatever the OP intended it appears that the UKIP contingent has arrived.

Sorry stare x post.

I live in a city in Italy and it's too crowded. I expect if I moved out to the mountains it wouldn't be so busy.

I agree re overcrowding in the South East OP. There has been lots of development where we live and even more is planned, yet no planned improvements to local infrastructure to cope with additional population.

Its not overcrowding as such as plenty have said there are sparsely occupied areas but along side that those areas often lack employment opportunities.
IMO it wouldn't be so bad if new housing built was actually realistically affordable..ie affordable for those earning around half the average wage which is realistically the normal persons wage able to rent or dare I say it purchase!
I'm south coast and it is unaffordable for those working and living on 'average' to normal wages to rent without help and HB doesn't meet the cost realistically.
A mortgage to afford a small flat requires round here an income in excess of 60k p/a and as a lot of jobs are seasonal or call centres most ordinary people in ordinary jobs cant afford them.
Certain areas are crowded..the cheap run down area is plagued with drug/drink users and the immigrants get housed along side them...poor buggers..buy to let is prevalent..some holiday, some student, and some 'cram em in,charge a fortune' for singles and families.
Beggars are out in force. Rough sleepers occupy parks...

It ain't space but lack of organisation, infrastructure, social provision and profiteering that make it seem worse.

Far too many people in London. Travelling on public transport is distressing, you actually can't walk down many of the streets because of over crowding.

Eh?

I've lived in London for 20 years. I have no idea what you're talking about. The only street it's difficult to walk down is Oxford Street and that's simply because it's stuffed with tourists.

The roads are congested but that is usually because they're being dug up.

Well whatever the OP intended it appears that the UKIP contingent has arrived.
OP shouldn't have put the word England in the title

allegretto this is true, I would say I might find a big city crowded, I lived in Rio and while it was crowded, it didn't feel overcrowded like London does. Which is odd because it has a similar population density.

Move elsewhere. The outer hebrides is quiet.

Feck, profiteering definitely makes it worse. Where I live is quite rough, but with the increase in population, the poor have been chased out and now we have a lot of posh flats, many of which are empty,bbut apparently very handy for parking an excess of wealth from countries far and wide. This in an outer zone and not great part of town.

I don't think infrastructure has caught up with growth.
Building isn't the answer either and we need space for agriculture and critically a lot of green space is flood plain too.
We need the uk to become less London- centric.
School shortages and hospitals don't ever get factored into new build developments either. I think things will need to get a lot worse before something is done about this.
In the end the country is in debt and there is a huge deficit. If we pay for infrastructure now our kids will suffer with paying the money back.
We will have to just get used to living in top of each other and rubbing along ok. And working from home where possible.

well when growth is thrust on us, in such a heinous way - al la Tony Blair of course growth cant catch up!

Kennington your post really depresses me and I think this is why we need to leave the EU now, becaue you seem to think its a fait acompli, its not!

What do they teach in schools nowadays?

Hairy, exactly what I was thinking. I also don't see how infrastructure can keep up with population growth.

I don't see any government daring to utter the O word either but many of them have several kids so that's probably why.

The government has no idea how many EU migrants are living here. EU passport holders aren’t routinely asked about the purpose of their travel to the UK. And even using the limited data that is gathered, anyone who says they’re visiting for less than a year isn’t counted as a migrant.

I know someone who came from Poland to work here for the summer of 2013. She arrived by coach and was never asked the purpose of her visit or how long she intended to stay – but if she had been asked, she’d’ve said “to work for 2-3 months”. However, during that summer here she met someone, they moved in together, she got a permanent job, they’re now married and have a new baby. So where does she appear in any statistics? I suspect nowhere, and she’s not a rare case, there are loads of similar stories. Cue someone making the sarky comment, “the plural of anecdote is not data”.

A couple of weeks ago the government revealed that they’ve issued over three times as many NI numbers to EU migrants than the supposed total number of EU migrants here. A few of those will have been more than one NI number being issued to the same person, e.g. where they moved jobs, but the great majority are a direct measure of the number of EU migrants working here.

If Remain wins, this country faces a future of unlimited EU migration for ever. The migration rates will certainly increase as more and more poorer countries join the EU, coupled with the continued failure of the Eurozone resulting in very high unemployment in many existing EU countries.

The 90-odd % of the country that isn’t built on isn’t spare. I despair for our countryside, our farmland, our beauty spots, our native species and habitats – already disappearing under concrete as more and more housing is built. Associated infrastructure is sorely needed but lags behind - because nobody's volunteering to pay more taxes to fund it.

Thanks for all your comments. It makes me sad to hear that all the front gardens are disappearing elsewhere too. It's actually the little things like that which make me the saddest. The fact that the scrubby old fields and wastelands where we used to pick blackberries and walk the dogs and make dens are now executive housing estates. Bloody sprawling housing estates spreading everywhere randomly and everyone in cars. So my boy has to be taken to a crowded park to "play". And there's no room for him in the local school so we have to drive for an hour in traffic. Everything green being built over everywhere. Poor old hedgehogs. Poor old frogs and toads.

Sorry. I know It's all a bit How Green Was My Valley. It's Hiraeth. (My maternal grandparents were Welsh so it's in my blood.)

I think what sickens me is that it's not about housing the homeless and the dispossessed. It's just random development on greenfields because that is where houses can be built most cheaply and sold most profitably. But you can't complain because some of the new arrivals are economic migrants from the depressed Eurozone and to complain would be "racist".

move here op

parks are pretty empty

I love the word hiraeth but have no idea how to pronounce it.

But I can feel it.

And many of the migrants have left their houses and flats in their countries and whole towns are now ghost towns.
The thing is though, economic migrants come and go, so we may destroy our greens and build and and when the economy cools down and the pendulum swings we well be left with crumbling estates no one wants.

Thanks stares. I think I might move one day. Although I probably won't. I'm like a cat or a robin or something. I'm rooted to my place.

Chardonnay, I dream of the day those flats are empty and demolished and green space put back! Won't happen in my lifetime though. Unless there's a killer virus....which will finish me off probably!