SPECTAT THE OR
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SOUTHERN COMFORTS M
iss Marple was of the opinion that there is a great deal of wickedness to be found in an English village. Nowadays, especially in the Home Counties, there is also a great deal of money to be found there (which amounts to the same thing, in the opinion of the Labour Party). It was only to be expected, therefore, that the revelation that, the south-east of England will need between 600,000 and one million more houses by the year 2000, and that many of them will almost certainly have to be built on Green Belt land, was unenthu- siastically greeted in the villages.
It is not difficult to sympathise. The capacity of British architects to produce monstrous eyesores in even the most beautiful landscape is tried and tested. There is something uniquely dispiriting about our modern housing estates, with their rows of little raw-red houses with small windows and bad workmanship. Who would not rather overlook green fields than such an estate.
But the defence of rose-clad cottages is not the end of the question: there are other important considerations. Those who pre- sent their, opposition to the erosion of Green Belts as motivated by the desire to preserve our rural tradition and landscape are not being wholly honest. The fact is that the tradition and landscape have, to a large extent, been destroyed already.
One has only to look at our fields to see that this is so. It is not long since the Government subsidised the destruction of hedgerows and uprooting of trees, in the name of agricultural efficiency. It is still possible to construct vast barns and out- buildings of quite spectacular ugliness without seeking anyone's permission, no matter how ruinous to the landscape. No rates are paid on these buildings. And all this destruction has been wrought — with- out great protest from the villages — so that landowners might take advantage of ludicrous subsidies. The characteristic sight of our rural areas is no longer the unspeak- able in pursuit of the uneatable, but the untaxed in pursuit of the uneaten. Similarly, our villages have long since ceased to function in the way Laurie Lee, or even Agatha Christie, described. At least in the south-east, the stockbroker and the advertising executive are now as char- acteristic as the squire and the vicar once were. The idea of a sempiternal, quintes- sentially English rural life, with cricket on the green and locally produced cider in the pub, is charming but has all the verisimili- tude of a socialist Utopia.
The real motives of those who want to preserve unaltered the Green Belts are not difficult to discern. They are afraid of a fall in property prices and that hitherto delight- ful, if gentrified, villages will be turned into characterless suburbs. These motives are selfish but not dishonourable, though wrongly thought so: for in a democracy everyone has the' right to fight for his interest. As for the preservationists' poli- tical allies, the rebellious Conservative MPs, they are afraid of losing votes, though the idea of Sussex and Kent turning Labour out of pique is not credible.
However, the larger interest of the country demands something more than the unimaginative fossilisation of an in- creasingly untenable scheme, in the hope that a national problem will go away. As is well known, the difference in house prices between north and south makes Tebbitian bicycle rides completely impossible, thus curtailing labour mobility, an important principle of the Thatcher revolution. The preposterous cost of housing relative to earnings is inducing dangerous indebted- ness, and consumes in an unproductive way an unhealthy proportion of savings.
Of course, building housing estates in picturesque valleys is not the only way of dealing with the problem. There are large urban areas of dereliction that could be redeveloped. More important, the destruc- tion of the market for private accommoda- tion by the Rent Acts must be reversed.
These Acts, which were passed to pro- tect tenants from wicked landlords, have resulted in low earners facing an un- pleasant choice: either queueing to rent property in the public sector, or over- extending themselves financially in buying property of their own. There is also little doubt that the Rent Acts have caused a deterioration in our cities' appearance.
Nevertheless, reversing the noxious effects of the Rent Acts and redeveloping derelict sites is unlikely to be sufficient to meet the future need. Beneficiaries of the newly buoyant economy who live just beyond the Green Belt that protects them from distressing urbanisation would, of course, prefer that the Government en- ticed people away from the south-east, or prevented them from moving there, by massive subsidy of the regions, another expedient which has been shown to be expensively inefficient and pointless.
The whole attitude to development shows the deep-rooted pusillanimity of English life. For many years, only the past has held for us the promise of artistic or architectural beauty. Our architects have done everything possible to sustain such an attitude by their incompetence and insensi- tivity. It is surely time we discovered an architectural vernacular of our own; with- out it, our land is lost in any case. In a free country, people should be free to live where they like. We should be trying to build well to fulfil their wishes. Instead, people of taste try to thwart them.
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