Looking back over my files, the excursions to the parks and gardens of Enfield Chase, I notice soft green photographs overlaid with current images (April 2001) of smoke and blight. Footpaths and designated country walks are now ribboned off, reckless hikers face £5,000 fines. The word of the moment is ‘contiguous’. Hireling academics and anonymous spokespersons, sweating under studio lights, don’t like the taste of it, this awkward term they have been instructed to employ. To be contiguous is to be served with a death warrant. Animals (pre-supermarket cellophane) face the bullet if they live in a bad neighbourhood. Reading the future by computer prediction, wanting to get shot of the whole business before a June election, government-sponsored boffins have decided to take out potential disease carriers (any unlanguaged, non-voting quadruped with a cold), and then to start again; or, better yet, turn the countryside into a memorial park. Recreation for visitors, the banning of country sports. Go and stay there, but don’t leave the hotel, that seems to be the message.
Channel 4 News takes a perverse pleasure in its nightly apocalypse franchise, the parade of liars and shifty scientists; merciless footage of fauna carnage, pyre smoke. More upside-down cows, bigger pits; fleecy lambkins cuddled by hooded executioners in gloves and white overalls. Held up to the camera for a tearjerk CU, before being dropped off at the big shed; the killing floor of upturned, expectant faces; shine-in-the-dark eyes.
By the spring of 2001, barred from the motorway orbit, I was trying to exorcise the embargoed Dome (£80 a minute to the taxpayer) by carrying out a series of walks, from Greenwich peninsula to various motorway interchanges. Heading southeast towards Swanley, you get a good sense of how one zone (generous proportions of Blackheath, grim bus shelters of Shooters Hill) gives way to another; small architectural revisions causing major shifts in the psychic balance. Complacency to rage within 200 yards: out of ribbon-development, the poly-filled Tudorbethan avenues of New Eltham, into the heritage Kentish village of Chislehurst (rain, caves closed, footpaths forbidden). Vehicles change from silver, mercury bubbles tucked away in car ports to four-wheel-drive cruisers with gentleman farmer aspirations.
The Swanley interchange is the spiral gate where South London lowlifes go head-to-head with drug barons and currency dealers. But, just now, according to the Evening Standard bulletin boards, the motorway, like the country paths of the Green Loop, is verboten. OFFICIAL: STAY OFF THE M25 IN RUSH HOUR.
This is too bizarre. It’s been rumoured for some time that New Labour want to downgrade (re-evaluate) the M25, turn it into the equivalent of a defeated candidate for Mayor of London or Mo Mowlam. Leakages have been hissing for months, penalties for single-occupant vehicles, but this announcement is still a surprise. A motorway, built to solve the problems of flow and congestion, has now become the problem. Success has killed it. The M25 is too popular, people use it indiscriminately: thieves on away days, touring the bosky suburbs; sexual service industries taking advantage of the excellent parking facilities and discreet greenery of the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Wisley; walkers, random inner-city strollers trying to define the point where London abdicates.
So let’s celebrate the first non-motoring motorway, the ‘girdle’ imagined by altruistic planners in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. The road is tired, it can’t take the stress of traffic; 170,000 vehicles a day going nowhere, wearing away the tarmac mantle. The solution is obvious: steer clear of the road at times when the road is most needed. Without traffic, the M25 is a marvel, a delight to the senses. Leaflets have been printed for distribution to travellers at service stations, channel ports and airports: KEEP OFF. Detour around the road that takes you around London. The Highways Agency understands that future autobahns will be virtual rather than actual. In time, the clapped-out circuit will be covered with Barratt homes, Fairview Estates, Laing’s flagpoles; 120 miles of housing stock, pedestrianised.
Once the M25 was redefined as a special-needs case, a privileged unfortunate soon to be granted heritage status, it was time to deal with contiguous countryside. The road that was no longer a road was sandwiched by fields that were no longer fields (golf courses, boarding kennels, pig sheds, reinvented woodland). The next step was obvious: downsize the green belt, slip the corset. Brownfield was the preferred option, trashed land nobody had any use for, armament factories, bone yards, gas works, could be computer-swiped into paradise pastures.
The first intimations that green belt was no longer acceptable in think-tank circles came when books started to appear promoting ‘blue sky’ fantasies. What is said is always the opposite of what is to be done. I was nervous when I read Bob Gilbert’s The Green London Way, an eco-excursionist book put out by those decent old leftists Lawrence and Wishart. Hand-drawn maps of a new London dreaming; anecdotes, small histories. The London Loop by David Sharp continued the process of opening up the suburbs, linking patches of woodland, riverside paths, tracks across chalk and greensand. These men saw London in its entirety, as a fortunate mixture of town and country, speculative development and eccentric vision, follies, palaces, water towers, footpaths that had been walked for generations. They respected the geography, the pattern of rivers and hills. Their conclusions were based on experience. They had been out there with their notebooks and cameras. They had done it.
In December 1999 the Cabinet Office issued a consultation paper, the green belt had created an undesirable ‘moat effect’. A moat or ditch or ha-ha to keep out, as architect Nicholas Hawksmoor wrote of the denizens of Whitechapel, ‘filth Nastyness & Brutes’. The document was, in effect, an early warning on behalf of the developers, the mall conceptualists, the rewrite industry. Government “was pure Hollywood: hype, the airbrushing of bad history; dodgy investors, a decent wedge in disgrace or retirement. A pay-off culture of bagmen and straightfaced explainers.
‘Special protection for the best agricultural land would be removed, while farmers would be encouraged to launch new kinds of businesses.’ What businesses? Barbecue pits? Landfill? Ski slopes (of carcasses) to rival Beckton? There must, said the report, be ‘a general presumption in favour of market forces’. A sweeping away of fussy restrictions. ‘A planning system more supportive of an enterprising countryside.’ The only way the countryside could become enterprising was to cease to be countryside: to become ‘off-highway’, a retail resort (like Bluewater), a weekend excursion that depended on a road that we were being advised to avoid. Tony Blair’s ‘Performance and Innovation Unit’ (a thirteen-strong team of academics and civil servants, ‘overseen’ by Andrew Smith, Chief Secretary to the Treasury) made the dissolution of the green belt a major element in an attempt at joined-up’ government.
Metropolitans need this green fantasy, the forest on the horizon, the fields and farms that represent a picture book vision of a pre-Industrial Revolution past. We need the illusion of sap in the vein. We hanker after market gardens, allotments bedded out with the latest horticultural novelties. The M25 is tolerable because it moves through an extended parkland (Epping Forest, the Thames Crossing, North Downs). The green belt, futile as it is, turns London into one of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities. Howard’s vision, originally published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, imagined a Utopian community, public buildings at the centre, surrounded by parks, houses with gardens, set within ‘an agricultural reservation’. Such reservations, check out Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City, don’t really work. It’s too swift an enactment of something that needs to evolve, through compromise and bodge, through centuries. Lay it out overnight and you get a Mormon dormitory or an unoccupied cemetery that looks great in the catalogue.
But the green belt is on a grander scale, conceived in desperation. G.L. Pepler’s ‘Greater London’ (published in the RIB A Town Planning Conference – Transactions, 1911) proposed a parkway encircling London at a ten-mile radius from Charing Cross (from the monument that marked the last stage of the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I). The parkway would act as a ring road and as the basis for a necklace of garden suburbs.
Arthur Crow, also writing in 1911, went further; he wanted to connect ten ‘Cities of Health’ (Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Dartford, Epping, Epsom, Romford, Uxbridge, Waltham, Watford). They would be joined by a ‘Great Ring Avenue’, a fantastic Egyptian or Mayan conceit, radiant settlements as outstations to a centre given over to public buildings, places of ceremony, commerce and worship. The avenue would be 500 feet wide and eighty-eight miles in circumference.
By the time Londoners had seen their city bombed, riverside industries destroyed, they were ready to think of renewal, deportation to the end of the railway line, the jagged beginnings of farmland. Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan 1944 (published in 1945) still worked through concentric bands: the Inner Urban Ring (overcrowded, fire-damaged), the Suburban Ring (to which inner-city casualties would migrate), the green belt (ten miles beyond the edge of London), and the Outer Country Ring, which would extend to the boundary of the regional plan.
Visionary maps, in muted Ben Nicholson colours, were produced. Lovely fold-out abstractions. Proposals in soft grey, pale green, blue-silver river systems. But always with the blood circuit of ring roads, the pastoral memory rind at the edge of things, at the limits of our toleration of noise and speed and grime. There must, said William Bull (in 1901), be ‘a green girdle around London’s Sphere… a circle of green sward and trees which would remain permanently inviolate’.
Until now. The first usage of the term ‘Green Belt’, in a London County Council resolution of 1924, stressed the same terms: ‘an inviolable rural zone around London’.
By the 1960s there was substantial ‘nibbling’ into that inviolable belt; Hertfordshire and Essex were targeted for housing schemes ‘because spare railway capacity existed’. Surrey and Kent could look after themselves. The Lea Valley with its disused greenhouses was approved as a residential area (for those opting to quit the increasingly ‘multicultural’ inner cities). A 400-acre green belt site was cleared for development in 1966.
New Labour, masters of double-talk, gesture politics, non-consenting consensus, were reversing the old Tory sentimentality over Metroland and the suburbs (Edward Heath in Bexleyheath, Margaret Thatcher in Finchley, Michael Portillo in Southgate). Thatcherites hated the inner cities (Hackney, Lambeth). Their pitch was simple: turn proles into home-owning suburbanites, stakeholders, share-buyers. London would be ring-fenced into ghetto, city of surveillance, privately policed estate. New Labour went further, a two (two dozen in the case of Michael Meacher) home portfolio; town house and country house. Wilderness was abhorrent. Rough pasture must be rationalised into Best Value recreational zones, retirement homes for happy butterflies. Farm animals were dirty, smelly, unreconstructed: cull them. What was required was a vertical wedge through the landscape (the Lee Valley Regional Plan), a designated hierarchy (media, recreation, development). What was not required was an holistic vision, any talk of belts or girdles or circuits. What was lost was the old dream of paradise gardens.