THE battle for the English countryside has begun. The front line is the A1(M)
as it sweeps through Hertfordshire north of London. On the right as you drive
north is Stevenage, a model New Town, one of eight built on green fields to
house escapees from overcrowded London in the 1950s. On the left is 800 hectares
of open countryside without so much as a tarred lane, where developers want to
build 10 000 houses. The development would, says the Council for the Protection
of Rural England (CPRE), be 鈥渢he largest area to be taken from the green belt in
half a century鈥�.
House-building is the new conservation cause c茅l猫bre.
Government forecasters say that England will need 4.4 million new homes by 2016,
largely because of a shift towards people living alone. Countryside campaigners
are determined that they should not be built in their back yards. Ministers,
increasingly wary of the rural lobby, say that most building should be on
derelict urban land鈥攂rownfield sites鈥攁nd the countryside invaded
only as a last resort
(see 鈥淭he other big issue鈥�, New 杏吧原创, 4 January 1997, p 12).
But not everyone agrees with this apparently sensible compromise. While no
one is suggesting that the countryside should be ploughed up indiscriminately
for development, some ecologists and planners warn that many brownfield sites
are of much greater value, both because of the rare species they harbour and for
recreation, than large tracts of countryside.
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鈥淭here is much more biodiversity in many derelict urban sites than in any
amount of East Anglian prairie,鈥� says Michael Breheny, geography professor at
the University of Reading. He is the author of a report on conservation in urban
areas to be published by the Town and Country Planning Association later this
month. Peter Shirley of the Wildlife Trusts, whose members manage many of the
nation鈥檚 nature reserves, agrees: 鈥淪ome greenfield sites are sterile while some
brownfield sites are incredibly rich. It is not satisfactory to conclude that
building on greenfield sites is always bad and building on brownfield sites is
always good.鈥�
Take the land west of Stevenage. The CPRE calls it 鈥渦nspoilt countryside
exceptionally rich in wildlife鈥�. But in March last year, a government planning
inspector agreed with consultants hired by developers that 鈥渕ost of the site is
farmed arable land . . . of negligible ecological importance鈥�, apart from a few
鈥減ossibly ancient鈥� copses that could be incorporated into the development.
Urban species
The value of these green fields as landscape is indisputable. But what is
seldom recognised is that they are ecologically much less interesting than, say,
Gargoyle Wharf, a demolished oil storage depot in south London that is a
hundredth the size of the Hertfordshire site. Gargoyle Wharf became famous two
years ago when squatters moved in to fight plans to build a supermarket there.
Ecologists came too. 鈥淲e found more than 300 species of flowering plants there,鈥�
says Nick Bertrand of the London Wildlife Trust. 鈥淚t was one of the most
fantastic sites I鈥檝e ever been to.鈥�
John Box, an environmental consultant chairing a review of Britain鈥檚 urban
wildlife for the UN鈥檚 Man and Biosphere Programme, says that old industrial and
mining land accounts for perhaps a sixth of all official sites of special
scientific interest. Many are unique habitats 鈥渜uite different from anything in
the countryside鈥�, whose polluted wastelands harbour a large number of
specialised and rare species.
While some of these sites may be little more than temporary homes for
colonising species that can easily move to similar habitats as the land is
redeveloped, other sites are irreplaceable because they were created by
industrial processes that are no longer used. Examples include the alkali waste
heaps from the 19th-century Leblanc process for manufacturing soda from common
salt, which has bequeathed 鈥渧ast swamps of orchids鈥� at Nob End in Bolton, and
the rare meadow grasses that inhabit the limestone slag heaps left by early
blast furnaces in the West Midlands.
Charles Gibson of the Oxford consultants Bioscan concludes in a
just-completed report for English Nature that 鈥渁 high proportion of Britain鈥檚
nationally scarce and rare species鈥� of invertebrates live on derelict industrial
land. They include the glow-worm Phosphaenus hemipterus, which lives on
old walls, and the 鈥�30 or 40 rare wasp and bees species found in quarries鈥�.
Gibson believes that there are hundreds of old industrial sites with unique,
undiscovered collections of flora and fauna. Others are well known to ecologists
but are redeveloped regardless鈥攕uch as the large chalk, sand and gravel
pits of Thurrock on the Thames estuary鈥檚 north bank.
Britain鈥檚 planners are also troubled by what Breheny calls the 鈥渇ashionable
logic of packing more people into existing urban areas鈥�. The doyen of urban
planners, Peter Hall of University College London, says: 鈥淚 think we are going
too far. In many places, the easy brownfield sites have been developed. What is
left is often highly contaminated land, like gasworks sites, that will be very
expensive to make safe.鈥�
By contrast, says Hall, there is plenty of countryside to go round. At the
most, he says, housing development would take 1.3 per cent of total rural land
in England over the next 20 years. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think that is spectacular. After
all, we don鈥檛 need all that land for farming. About 5 per cent of our farmland
is currently in set-aside, and in the supposedly land-starved Southeast the
figure is nearer 10 per cent.鈥�
Green dispute
There is confusion in the environmental movement about what should be done
with contaminated land. Last month, Friends of the Earth called on the
government 鈥渢o act to allow polluted land to be cleaned up for the benefit of
future generations鈥�, demanding the government set a target of 75 per cent of new
housing on brownfield sites. Urban ecologists are aghast. 鈥淚f a site is
contaminated, this is used as an excuse to clean it up, build on it and claim
the environment has been enhanced,鈥� says Bertrand. 鈥淚n fact, wildlife
communities have been laid waste.鈥�
Hall adds that the policy of treating rural development as a last resort
could end up harming the countryside by preventing proper planning of its
inevitable development. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛, for instance, think about whether a few
large rural sites might be better than many smaller ones,鈥� he says. This could
make it harder to achieve the goal of 鈥渟ustainable鈥� development that discourages
use of the car, reduces pollution and conserves scarce resources.
Many planners also believe that the government鈥檚 new target for shoehorning
60 per cent of new housing development into brownfield sites will lead to a
subtle redefinition of an already vague phrase. 鈥淏rownfields鈥� could come to
include not just derelict urban land but also previously used rural land and,
perhaps more worryingly, scarce green spaces in cities. Breheny estimates that
12 per cent of new housing in recent years has been built on urban green spaces
such as playing fields and allotments, many of them sold to developers by
hard-pressed local councils.
Shirley fears that if this trend continues, 鈥渋n ten years鈥� time people will
be complaining that there is no space left in the cities鈥�. To forestall this,
many planners believe it is time to consider building a new generation of towns
in the countryside. Places just like Stevenage.
