Towns to grow in green fields
Countryside at risk: Millions of homes needed
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Your support makes all the difference.Fields will disappear under bricks and concrete if land is to be found for the millions of homes needed for a growing number of households, a major study revealed yesterday.
The Government estimates that almost 4.5 million new homes are needed over the next 20 years. But an investigation into where they may be built reveals a mismatch between demand and supply of land - and this could have a dramatic effect on the landscape of southern England.
As people continue to leave the cities, planners say that "large-scale use" of undeveloped land is "inevitable".
Their study, produced by the Town and Country Planning Association and the Joseph Rowntree Trust, warns that while the Government policy of using former industrial sites for development means that half of all housing is now built on recycled or "brownfield" land, this will decline in the years ahead.
Professor Peter Hall, of University College, London, who co-edited the report, said that the pressure to move out of cities "threatens current policies which encourage sustainable, environmentally sensitive development".
Demand for land in the south east is strongest west of London, but most former industrial land lies to the east. In the north west, land is available in Manchester and Liverpool but most new housing is needed in Cheshire, Cumbria and rural Lancashire. In Yorkshire and Humberside demand is in the north - but most brownfield sites are in South Yorkshire.
Solutions to finding enough land, says the report, include spreading into protected greenbelt countryside, building along rail corridors, filling vacant sites within urban areas and creating new villages and towns.
Tony Burton, a senior planner with the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) said: "Commitment to urban renewal should be the starting point in the debate."
It is significant that the idea of new towns has returned, after nearly a decade of intense opposition exemplified by anger over plans to build over Foxley Wood in Berkshire.
Now new towns are on the drawing-board for Hampshire, Kent, Berkshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, East Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire,Glouces- tershire and Devon, plus "bolt-on" settlements next to Bristol, Swindon, Peterborough, Dorchester, Dartford and Glasgow.
In January a pounds 500m "bolt-on" new town complete with 5,500 homes, to be built next to Peterborough, was announced by the Hanson Trust. In Hampshire, Eagle Star have drawn up plans to build an 8,000-home new town at Micheldever, on 1,000 acres of arable land beside the main railway line from Southampton to Waterloo.
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