About 25 years ago, I would often drive from London to Sussex to see my parents in sunny Hove. But then my father died, my mother moved, her friends in Hove fell from their perches, then my mother died, too, and there was nothing left to visit in Hove. But, last year, I went back to see the hilltop crematorium and blub over my parents’ rose bush, and as I drove out of stinking London, I noticed, on the far side of Hammersmith Bridge, that something had changed.
The pleasant route I remembered looked rather bleak and bare. Then I realised that the lovely green front gardens had nearly all disappeared and been turned into parking bays. Next to this, the crematorium would look cheery. But never mind looks, I thought now that flooding is something of a problem and huge swaths of the world are under water, it isn’t clever to coat your garden in concrete. You and thousands of others.
We’ve got some around here. Even important politicians who ought know better have paved over their front gardens. Where there were once stunning, dark-purple buddleia, shrubs, trees, cheery flowers and luscious perfumes, now there are grim stone slabs and concrete, spoiling my dog walkies around the block. I perked up a little when I saw that pebbles had replaced concrete in one garden. But it was a trick. They were just covering the concrete.
I, too, used to have a concrete front garden, with no run-off, which flooded in heavy rains, so I dug it up, planted magnolia and hollyhocks, and the flooding stopped. Easy. Why not make it mandatory? Better to have a sensible nanny state than a catastrophically flooded one. Do it yourself or the council nips round with a pneumatic drill and does it for you.
Otherwise, we’ll soon be in big trouble. Because as the Guardian’s environment editor John Vidal has said, irresponsible “urban development…[and] concretisation” can be “as much to blame for the floods as climate change”. Our millions of concreted small gardens make a lot of concrete. So small is important, as well as beautiful.
