Rowan Moore’s discussion of the green belt (“Is it time to rethink the green belt?”, New Review) was partly based on the premise that green belts have proved inviolate since they were first designated. The permanence of green belt is one of its essential characteristics, but this does not mean that green belts are truly unchanging.
Planning policy has always allowed for the review of green belt boundaries in appropriate circumstances. If there are no better alternatives, and green belts do need to be reviewed, the Campaign to Protect Rural England would prefer to see this done strategically rather than through the current piecemeal erosion. Any review would have to take into account the needs of the whole of the relevant green belt area and consider the reasons for designating land in the first place.
Ultimately, the green belt does not exist to provide recreational land or to protect landscape and biodiversity; it is there to protect the character of towns and villages and encourage urban regeneration.
Matt Thomson
Campaign to Protect Rural England
London SE1
The problem with the green belt lies in our need to own space. The Englishman’s view of his home as his castle has led to the two-dimension sprawl of matchbox houses across suburbia. Shared outdoor space could lead to a more innovative approach to building on the green belt. We could improve the green belt, building under and around it, interlocking with each other and sharing space in three dimensions. Shared parks, allotments and play areas could save space. It’s time to rethink how we plan our suburbs.
George Wade
Architect, ALL Design
London SW11
Oxford is no longer a tight-knit medieval town with a few charming Victorian suburbs; it is economically and socially intertwined with the towns and villages around it, which, as much as the green belt countryside, represent the “setting” of Oxford. This interdependency makes transport a key issue and road congestion as well as air pollution are at crisis level.
Planning functions for this city region are in the hands of five different authorities, while a sixth, the county council, is responsible for transport policy. Oxford and Oxfordshire cry out for properly coordinated, rigorous planning and transport policies based on pragmatic common sense, and objective analysis of the facts, not tainted by political antagonism.
A university-commissioned report last year, The Oxford Innovation Engine, identified the potential for an additional contribution from the region to the national economy of “at least” £1bn, if the constraints were removed. Foremost of the constraints is the infrastructure – housing, employment space and transport systems. We have to look not at how we can prevent development but how we can do it to the benefit of future generations.
Suggesting that all we need to do to preserve the setting of our city, towns and villages, to prevent “urban sprawl” and to safeguard our countryside is to keep green belts intact is naive. Our own report, Oxford Futures , sets out some suggestions for a way forward. To denounce these ideas on the grounds that they might fail as a result of corruption, while clinging to patently inadequate, 65-year-old legislation in the belief that this way lies salvation from the concrete jungle, is nonsense.
Peter Thompson
Chairman, Oxford Civic Society
Your article did not include the equally important national parks. Here on the overcrowded south coast urban strip, our green belt is effectively the new South Downs national park and I dare say others fulfil similar functions in other parts of England. All play an important part in preserving natural landscape heritage and once built on they are gone forever.
Dr James Walsh
West Sussex county councillor
Rustington
W Sussex
