Falling in love with the countryside next door

Fourteen experts from a wide range of fields have set out their visions of a positive future to the Green Belt in a new essay collection. ‘Perspectives on the Urban Edge’. We’re excited to launch the first essay by our Chief Executive, Roger Mortlock. Roger explores the Green Belt’s origins and its essential role today in tackling climate change, safeguarding nature, and enhancing wellbeing, he highlights why protecting and reimagining the Green Belt matters more than ever.

In 1939, the ticket hall in Charing Cross station celebrated London’s Green Belt in an exhibition of posters championing the countryside easily accessible by public transport from the capital. The ‘country joys’ of Edgeware, Morden and Uxbridge may be harder to summon almost a century later, but other posters urging visitors to Box Hill, Wormley, Godstone and Epping Forest are testament to the power of the Green Belt, introduced shortly after. These are places still recognisable as countryside, remarkably close to London. Train companies today reproduce similar nostalgic posters from the same era urging people to visit our National Parks and coastline, but there is something perhaps even more powerful about a celebration of the countryside on your doorstep that is accessible to all. These evocations of the countryside next door were aspirational, beautiful, and perhaps most importantly, open to any Londoners for the price of a bus, tube or train ticket.

Around the same time, Sheffield Council and the local transport operators urged people in the city to ‘spend a day in the country’ and enjoy the new Green Belt which had designated farms, woods and moorland around the city thanks to the determination of countryside pioneer Ethel Haythornthwaite. Today Sheffield still celebrates its relationship with the countryside next door, dubbing itself ‘the outdoor city’ — a sustainable, compact, liveable city that recognises the value of its hinterland and the wildness beyond. Yet the current debate about the future of the Green Belt focuses entirely on what it prevents rather than what it delivers. There is no doubt that today there are different drivers — not least the climate and nature emergencies crises, and indeed the need for affordable housing – that should inform how we think about the future of the Green Belt. But it’s a designation that many other countries envy and could have a vital role to play in addressing 21st century challenges. Land protected by the Green Belt covers 12.6% of England, often a figure used to undermine its value, but this spatial designation could be the key to unlocking new solutions.

Let’s start with nature’s recovery. If we are serious about 30% of land delivering for nature by 2030, then a spatial designation like the Green Belt could play a critical role. In 2015 the Natural Capital Committee recommended creating 350,000 hectares of new woodland and wetland on the Green Belt and on other land around our towns and cities. The Green Belt already has a higher-than-average percentage of deciduous woodland (at 19%) and is home to 34% of England’s Community Forests, 39% of Local Nature Reserves, accounting for 60% of the land created in Local Nature Reserves since 2010. Undoubtedly more could be done. Take up of agri-environment schemes is significantly lower in the Green Belt, but projects like CPRE London’s call for a new M25 of trees to circle the capital demonstrate what can be possible with some vision.

On climate, the University of Surrey found that rural belts around cities can reduce urban temperatures by over 0.5°c. Using 20 years of data, researchers showed how nearby rural areas could bring a city’s temperature down. The biggest cooling effects happen where the rural ring around a city extends for at least half the city’s diameter. Urban over-heating was mitigated further by joining up patches of rural land, planting more woodland and by creating large wetlands.

Next up, let’s consider the potential of the Green Belt to deliver for health and wellbeing. We know that 39% of people feel visiting green spaces is important to their wellbeing, and the Green Belt provides important access to nature for more than 30 million people. The Green Belt has a higher-than-average density of public rights of way, with 30,000km of footpaths, bridleways and byways. For many, the ‘ordinary’ countryside around our villages, towns and cities is not only the place they access routinely, but the land that provide a sense of place and belonging.

And finally in this too brief paean to the Green Belt, to farming, which still accounts for 65% of land in the Green Belt. The case for rethinking how we farm in the Green Belt is made powerfully elsewhere in this collection, but the basic truth that we need to produce more food (especially perishables) close to where people live, deserves repetition. Faced with the challenges of food security and reducing food miles, the Green Belt could be our secret weapon. There are already many inspiring examples of towns and cities transforming the relationship between the urban and rural through the lens of a more sustainable approach to food and farming. The current debate about the Green Belt is entirely about housing, or rather entirely about large developers who love the profitability of Green Belt schemes. Since 2009, between 6,000 and 10,000 homes a year are built on greenfield Green Belt land — too many of them through speculative applications creating car dependent communities desperately short of infrastructure.

The urban edge is the most contested of all the land in our country and where speculation and profit from inflated land prices are most worrying. Viewing it through a housing lens alone is short sighted and ignores the huge contribution that peri-urban land could make to nature, climate mitigation, wellbeing and landscapes. We need a land use framework that genuinely works across government to make sure that land is used in the right way, cognisant of all its potential. Perhaps then we could celebrate the Green Belt for what it delivers, rather than demonise it for what it ‘blocks’.