Build on the green belt — but do it wisely
Releasing land near rail stations would allow a housing boom, with promises to rewild elsewhere
‘A gimcrack civilisation crawls like a gigantic slug across the country, leaving a foul trail of slime behind it.” That was Howard Marshall, the Dimbleby of his era, writing in Britain and the Beast, a diatribe against development published in 1938. Poets, politicians and intellectuals, including EM Forster and JM Keynes, contributed to the volume. It was part of a campaign to put a stop to the sprawl of London, which had doubled in size since the late 19th century, as developers threw up cheap houses along the roads into Kent, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Middlesex and Essex.
The campaign worked. After the war, the Labour government’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act in effect nationalised the right to develop by requiring landowners to get government permission
