“ I respectfully insist Greater London has grown enough. I believe the sprawling city should get no bigger by swallowing even more surrounding towns and countryside. Within its existing boundaries its 9 million residents should not increase even more in number and not be excepted to live, work and travel even more densely packed together than they do already.
In planning policy and in so many other issues it is obvious we stand at many crossroads in history. The decision to take specific forks in the road map of policy taken now with dangerous haste seem to have a dangerous momentum of their own. Nowhere except perhaps for public health is this more important that planning control. And of course the two are completely connected.
We hear again and again London with its increasingly bloated bulk swallows too much of the nation’s resources. It is in grave danger of collapsing under its own growth with its services and transport unable to support itself, both to its own ruin and serious damage to the country as a whole.
Many economy driving functions have moved elsewhere, both by policy and their own accord. New housing should follow these as an opportunity and necessity. It should be built where there is room for it with enough space inside and out for a decent chance for residents to have decent lives.
Dick Whitington’s trek to London ended in a large town house with his wife and servants. Modern searches for the capital’s sadly not gold paved streets is more likely to end up with families living in cramped one or two bedroom apartments.
These are being thrown up in high rise high density estates squeezed onto plots of land too small to hold them at a cost too low to be soundly built. They replicate the worst failings of housing policy in the past and then add to them.
Even our Victorian ancestors would recognise such tiny and inadequate accommodation as socially unacceptable pre-engineered for social deprivation. They would see the danger to life through inevitably poor design and construction. They would recoil from them as hot beds for the spreading of disease. Why then is it exactly the housing we seem to be committed to building so much of today?
This is not something that may or may not happen in a vague and far off place and future. It is happening now with planning decisions perhaps week away. It is happening here and now at the old gas works in New Barnet and the stations at High Barnet and Cockfosters.
So I think we should fight both ill-conceived projects like these AND block building on London’s Green Belt and Barnet's own dwindling green spaces such as Whalebones Park. This is not a question of moving development that would be a blight here to be a blight somewhere else. It is moving it somewhere else where properly planned and built it would be an opportunity instead. ”