English landscapes under threat

For a larger view of this image, go to the Telegraph article "Greatest theat yet to England's 'jewels in the crown.'"

From the Telegraph editorial "Concreting over Wessex":

Thomas Hardy had it spot on when he wrote: "The offhand decision of some commonplace mind in high office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years."

Today, in the Dorset he loved, an area declared one of outstanding natural beauty is to be gouged and buried by a bypass. Other tales are told of housing sprawl and road blight from the Lincolnshire Wolds to the Downs of Kent.

It is not so much that Labour's planning policy is wrong as that it has no coherent planning policy. This is a government that thinks old established gardens count as "brownfield sites".

The Campaign to Protect Rural England might not be right in its every idea, but it is surely right to draw attention to nine areas of great beauty where planned developments will needlessly destroy the glory of England not for a hundred years but for a thousand.

Also see the Daily Telegraph article "Greatest theat yet to England's 'jewels in the crown.'"

The press release from the Campaign to Protect Rural England is online here.
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Hearing Henry Glassie, author of Vernacular Architecture, speak about these kinds of issues in the U.S. made me understand better the value of the landscape in reality as well as an organizing metaphor for thinking about all aspects of cultural resources and for planning land use and sustainability.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England has an amazing number of important campaigns, on sprawl, local food webs, etc. The anti-sprawl campaign on "housing supply" makes the link to urban revitalization through this publication, Why an urban renaissance matters to rural campaigners. There is much more to learn from going through this website.

Index Keywords: cultural-landscapes