Sadiq Khan has plans for the city’s remaining green belt, which Aaron Newbury argues must be protected.
Sadiq thinks building on the green belt will solve London’s housing crisis (Image: Getty)
There are few things left in London that remind the people, like me, who live here that we still live in a country, and not in a vast, anxious megacity stitched together by beige coffee chains and traffic cones. The green belt is one of them.
For those of us in outer London, it’s the city’s last curtain of calm, a quiet borderland where one can escape the capital’s fretful hum and remember, briefly, what grass looks like when it isn’t framed by a bicycle lane.
Now comes the latest whispered delight from City Hall: our Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, seemingly wants to bulldoze it. The man who cannot keep the Tube running past midnight now imagines himself master-planner of England’s countryside, armed with a biro, a mandate, and all the charm of a planning inspector with indigestion.
Of course, he calls it “reform”. Politicians always do. In reality, it is a plan to pour concrete over the very lungs of London, while giving himself the imperial power to overrule local councils who dare to suffer independent thought. Democracy, under Mr Khan, has the same fate as most London bus timetables, politely printed, seldom observed.
London needs homes, and you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who disagrees. But there is something faintly deranged about the notion that salvation lies in flattening the fields that keep Londoners from losing their sanity. The green belt is not “empty space,” as the developers claim, usually while adjusting the cufflinks on their very expensive shirts. It is the space where Londoners go to remember they are human.
On its footpaths a young mother can finally breathe. An office worker, beaten down by the merciless commute, can enjoy some quiet nature instead of announcements. Pensioners can walk without dodging lycra clad cyclists or activists with clipboards trying to shake you down for a signature. These are not trivialities. Study after study shows green space reduces anxiety, improves mental health, and protects communities from the claustrophobia of urban life.
But to the Mayor, this is simply acreage awaiting its destiny as another cluster of identical flats with identical corridors and identical management fees. It has the depressing whiff of every modern scheme: a great roar of “transformation” followed by a great deal of billable construction and rather less joy.
Sadiq Khan is looking at where to build much-needed new homes (Image: Getty)
And the manner of it – the breathtaking conceit – is almost comic. Local councils, those dull but necessary guardians of community feeling, are to be swept aside if they vote the ‘wrong way’. That is democracy in the same way a puppeteer is a dance partner.
London does not need to metastasise across every meadow in Essex. It needs imagination, such as the regeneration of the vast brownfield sites already sitting neglected, moss-covered monuments to political idleness. It needs leaders who understand that once the green belt is gone, no amount of press releases or depressing beer gardens will ever replace it.
The green belt is not a luxury, it is a shared asset – a promise that London would know where to stop. Mr Khan appears determined to snap that in two, with all the delicacy of a man reversing a JCB after lunch.
Call it planning reform if you like. Most Londoners will recognise it instantly: a vandal’s charter wrapped in modern jargon, and a betrayal wearing a hi-vis jacket.
