The inaccuracies about London from outsiders never cease to amaze me!
The London Green Belt, the first in Britain, was implemented in 1938. Since then London has been unable to expand into or beyond it. The County of Greater London and it's boundaries within those confines was established in 1965, over half a century ago.
So what is this mythical expansion threatening to swallow the rest of the country?
.
Like this?
" The first implementation of the Green Belt was in London in 1938, when the Green Belt Act was passed, allowing the government to purchase lands and form development restriction covenants with landowners. The subsequent Greater London Plan and post-war Town and Country Planning Act affirmed the designation of a huge swath of land around London as an official Green Belt, within which urban development was generally prohibited and whose inner border designated an urban growth boundary. Since then, Greenbelts have appeared in cities throughout the world, including Seoul, Bangkok, Berlin, Toronto, and Boulder.
[xxxvi] While Greenbelts have certainly limited development within the greenbelt area itself, they have not consistently enforced development boundaries. Amati and Yokohari report that while the belt is somewhat effective at the urban fringe, “At the regional scale,” spurred by high housing prices and development constraints, “development ‘leapfrogs’ the green belt into deeper rural areas,” and “such development has been linked to a higher car use and longer car journeys,” straining infrastructure and defeating any ecological intentions.These outer agglomerations, too close and too lifeless to be their own cities (as Howard had hoped) but far enough from the main city to cause traffic headaches, can eventually overwhelm and defeat the purpose of the Green Belt, as happened in Beijing. In addition, Wu and Plantiga show that the amenity value of the Green Belt itself serves to draw development away from the city center and closer to the belt, serving to spread rather than compact the city."
I have visited more customer complaints in housing developments in the so called green belt areas than I care to remember, and every year there are more and more, it was a great idea, but has
just managed to spread London traffic further and further out to satellite areas tha are really part of the City.
The latest statistics produced by Communities and Local Government (CLG) show that approximately 200,000 new dwellings were built in 2007 with 2% in the designated Green Belt, and 22% of these (or 0.4% of the total number of dwellings) were built on the previously undeveloped land in the Green Belt. By comparison, 14% of all new dwellings were built on agricultural land across England
Here are handy tips to get a house built in the Green Belt
https://urbanistarchitecture.co.uk/how-to-get-planning-permission-for-building-on-greenbelt-land-in-the-uk/
Not very encouraging and now the Government have an initiative to change the law to release areas in the Green belt for development
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-plans-to-relax-laws-against-building-on-green-belt-land-a6764511.html
"
"But under a
government consultation launched on Monday rules will be changed to allow councils “to allocate appropriate small-scale sites in the Green Belt specifically for starter homes”.
While this would not allow generalised development on Green Belt, it would allow the construction of homes under the Government’s new Start Homes housing scheme.
The “Starter Homes” scheme involves private developers building new homes for people to buy; these homes are 20 per cent cheaper than normal homes to buy because of a small government subsidy. "
The Expression "Thin end of the wedge springs to mind"
The Green Belt has been a delay in the expansion of the city that has effectively continued beyond it with Satellite towns, and will disappear after Brexit. and in any case merely acted as a sort of internal "greenish moat" of London.
