The Road to Little Dribbling (17 page)

I

S
TAND ON THE EASTERN
slopes of Noar Hill in Hampshire and you have a view that is pretty well unimprovable. Orchards, fields, and dark woods sit handsomely upon the landscape. Here and there village rooftops and church spires poke through the trees. It is lovely and timeless and tranquilly spacious, as English views so often are. It seems miles from anywhere, yet not far off over the Surrey Hills is London. Get in a car and in an hour you can be in Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square. To me, that is a miracle, that a city as vast and demanding as London can have prospects like this on its very doorstep, on every side.

What accounts for the great bulk of this sumptuousness is the Metropolitan Green Belt, a ring of preserved landscape, mostly woods and farmland, encircling London and several other English towns and cities with the single-minded intention of alleviating sprawl. The notion of green belts was enshrined in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and is to my mind the most intelligent, farsighted, thrillingly and self-evidently successful land management policy any nation has ever devised.

And now many people want to discard it.

The Economist
magazine, for one, has for years argued that the green belts should be cast aside as a hindrance to growth. As an
Economist
writer editorializes from a dementia facility somewhere in the Home Counties: “The green belts that stop development around big cities should go, or at least be greatly weakened. They increase journey times without adding to human happiness.”

Well, they add a great deal to my happiness, you pompous, overeducated twit. Perhaps I see this differently from others because I come from the Land of Shocking Sprawl. From time to time these days I drive with my wife from Denver International Airport to Vail, high in the Colorado Rockies, to visit our son Sam. It is a two-hour drive and the first hour is taken up with just getting out of Denver. It is a permanent astonishment to me how much support an American lifestyle needs—shopping malls, distribution centers, storage depots, gas stations, zillion-screen multiplex cinemas, gyms, teeth-whitening clinics, business parks, motels, propane storage facilities, compounds holding fleets of U-Haul trailers or FedEx trucks, car dealerships, food outlets of a million types, and endless miles of suburban houses all straining to get a view of distant mountains.

Travel twenty-five or thirty miles out from London and you get Windsor Great Park or Epping Forest or Box Hill. Travel twenty-five or thirty miles out from Denver and you just get more Denver. I suppose Britain must have all this infrastructure, too, though I don’t honestly know where most of it is. What I do know is that it isn’t in the fields and farmland that ring every city. If that is not a glory, I don’t know what is.

The arithmetic of the British countryside is simple and compelling. Britain has about 60 million acres of land and about 60 million people—one acre for each person. Every time you give up ten acres of greenfield site to build a superstore, in effect ten people lose their acres. By developing countryside you force more and more people to share less and less space. Trying to limit that growth isn’t NIMBYism, it’s common sense.

If it was only
The Economist
calling for the destruction of the green belt, my despair would be manageable, but lately the
Guardian
has decided to come down on the side of dismemberment, with a series of articles mostly suggesting that the green belt is a kind of elitist conspiracy that stops affordable housing from getting built. As Prof. Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics puts it in one of the
Guardian
’s articles: “What green belt really seems to be is a very British form of discriminatory zoning, keeping the urban unwashed out of the Home Counties.” Well, let me say at once that I have uttered huge amounts of tosh in my time, but I take my hat off to Prof. Cheshire.

The article in which the wise professor was quoted was “Six Reasons Why We Should Build on the Green Belt” by Colin Wiles, a planning consultant. This book is not a polemic, so I am not going to itemize his reasons for wanting to destroy the green belt or respond to each (though believe me I could), but on the other hand at least two of the ideas are so recklessly wrong, and so close to becoming received wisdom, that I can’t let them pass without comment.

The first and most dangerous charge routinely laid against the green belt is that it isn’t actually all that special, that much of the land is scrubby and degraded. Well, you decide. According to a study by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, green belts in England contain 30,000 kilometers of footpaths and other rights of way, 220,000 hectares of woodland, 250,000 hectares of top-quality farmland, and 89,000 hectares of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. That sounds to me like things worth keeping. If any green belt land is degraded, the answer surely is not to build on it but to make the owner improve it or sell it to someone who will improve it. Allowing owners to cash in on poorly managed land is the quickest way to get lots more poorly managed land.

The other common charge against the green belt is that it doesn’t work, that it just forces people to move farther and farther away from cities to find affordable housing. Wiles offers nothing in the way of evidence to support this other than that he has noticed that a lot of people live outside London. If his view is going to have any credence, he needs to explain why Americans, who have no green belts and never have had them, have for over a hundred years been moving farther and farther out from their own cities. It isn’t house prices that drive them out; the outer suburbs usually have the most expensive housing. What the people on the outer edge are always looking for, in fact, is the thing that England has already: countryside.

The one charge against the green belt that has some foundation is that it keeps a lot of land off the market. Yes, it does. That is actually the idea of it. But that land isn’t sitting there doing nothing. It shelters wildlife, transpires oxygen, sequesters carbon and pollutants, grows food, provides quiet lanes for cycling and footpaths for walking, adds grace and tranquillity to the landscape. It is already under enormous pressure. Fifty thousand houses have been built on green-belt land in the last ten years. Sussex alone lost thirteen ancient woodlands to development in the same period, according to the Woodland Trust. We ought to be appalled to see this happening, not clamoring for more of it.

Southeast England is already as densely populated as the Netherlands, yet thanks to the softening influence of the green belt large expanses of it remain verdant and attractive and seemingly timeless—the England that most of us appreciate and love. There is absolutely no need to throw that away. The most conservative estimates show that there is enough brownfield land in England to build a million homes at average densities. Colin Wiles’s article doesn’t even mention the possibility of building on brownfield land. Why?

People are simply being misled. At about the same time the
Guardian
ran Wiles’s article, it ran another article headlined “Why Surrey Has More Land for Golf Courses Than for Homes.” This was based on a study by Paul Cheshire, the professor quoted above, which declared that houses in Surrey occupy about 2.5 percent of the county, less than golf courses. The point was to show just how dangerously skewed Britain’s land use has become. But Radio 4’s blessed and peerless fact-checking program
More or Less
looked into the figures, and found that Prof. Cheshire had been a little selective with his calculations. He counted only the space occupied literally by the houses themselves, not their gardens or any of the other land around them. So if all the houses in Surrey were squeezed together without any space in between, then they would indeed occupy less space than golf courses, but that was not what the report implied and it was certainly not the way the
Guardian
or any other publication interpreted it. When gardens are added back, Surrey’s domestic properties turn out to occupy 14 percent of the county’s land, roughly three times the average for England as a whole. There is, in short, nothing irregular about the volume of housing in Surrey and nothing to support the suggestion that its land has been profligately misused. But you can find wildly inaccurate interpretations of Prof. Cheshire’s claim all over the Internet now. That’s unfortunate, to put it mildly.

—

But enough of my disturbed ranting. Let’s go for a walk and enjoy some of this lovely countryside while we still can. Thanks to the birth of my new granddaughter (Rosie, gorgeous, thank you), I was under instructions to stay near home for a couple of days, in case anyone could think of a way to make me useful, so I decided that I would have an outing or two in my own neck of the woods, beginning with a literary stroll to the homes of our two most celebrated local authors, Gilbert White and Jane Austen. Thus it was that I stood on Noar Hill enjoying the view and thanking God that unwashed people weren’t allowed to see this.

A mile or so beyond Noar Hill is Selborne, a pretty village with two pubs and a good village store with a post office. In the middle of the high street is the house of Gilbert White, Selborne’s most famous son. Gilbert White is a person that most people seem either to know a good deal about or know nothing at all about, though I suspect that many of those who place themselves in the first category would really be more at home in the second. He was a country parson, who was born in Selborne in 1720 and died there seventy-three years later and didn’t do a great deal in between other than plant vegetables and watch the passing seasons. He lived quietly, never married, and was so unworldly that he thought the Sussex Downs “a mighty range of mountains.” (They are not even big hills.) Through most of his life he kept notes and wrote letters, which became the basis for his extraordinarily enduring book,
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne,
which the writer Richard Mabey has called “one of the most perfectly realized celebrations of nature in the English language.”

The book was nearly a lifetime in the making. It was published in 1788 when White was sixty-eight and just five years from the end of his earthly run. It takes the form of letters to other naturalists, often of a discursive nature, arranged in no particular order, but it has been amazingly influential. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Constable, and Virginia Woolf were among its great admirers. Charles Darwin said it inspired him to become a naturalist. In 220 years, the book has never been out of print. By one calculation, it is the fourth most published book in English.

White’s house, called the Wakes, is now a museum, and a slightly odd one in that it is also devoted to the explorers Frank and Lawrence Oates, who had no connection to Gilbert White, Selborne, or even Hampshire. They are there simply because in 1955 a wealthy member of the Oates clan, Robert Washington Oates, gave money to buy the house on the understanding that some of it would be used to celebrate his cousin Lawrence and uncle Frank.

It makes an improbable but surprisingly splendid package. Most of the house is given over to Gilbert White. In one of the front rooms downstairs is a life-sized, and very lifelike, model of Gilbert White himself. I was surprised to find that he was just a little guy—barely five feet tall and not more than a hundred pounds, I would guess—and of an open and amiable disposition if the model is anything to go by.

In a glass case nearby was the original manuscript copy of the
Natural History,
along with bound copies of almost every edition of the book ever printed (and there have been hundreds). White’s own copy, according to the caption beside it, was bound in the skin of his pet spaniel. I am guessing that the spaniel died at a convenient moment and wasn’t sacrificed specially, but the caption didn’t say.

White lived much of his life in this house, and the rooms are mostly kept as he would have known them. The visitor can, for instance, step into Gilbert’s snug study and see quills and parchment and some spectacles left on the desk, as if White has just stepped out. The far end of the house changes abruptly into Oates territory, which I thought would be a little ridiculous but was actually quite diverting. Of the two commemorated Oateses, Frank was unquestionably the lesser. He lived only from 1840 to 1875 and spent much of his short life battling ill health. He went exploring in Africa and the Americas in a curious, ultimately misguided attempt to build himself up through fresh air and adventure, but merely caught a fever and died somewhere along the upper reaches of the Zambesi River.

Far more memorable was his kinsman Captain Lawrence Oates, though he lived an even briefer life. He was one of the members of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic in 1910, which with great difficulty reached the South Pole only to find it planted with Norwegian flags, left a short while earlier by a party led by Roald Amundsen. Greatly disappointed and already physically diminished, Scott and his four men turned back, but ran into terrible weather, slowing their progress to a series of short, daily stumbles. They ran short of food and suffered wretched physical hardships. Descriptions of their frostbite are genuinely horrifying. Oates ended up in a particularly bad way and famously sacrificed himself so that the others might have a hope of living. Stepping to the flap of the tent, he said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” It was, Scott wrote in his diary, the “act of an English gentleman.” I have no doubt he was wearing a dinner jacket. A point not often noted is that it was Oates’s thirty-second birthday. His body was never found. Scott and the others perished soon afterward, dying in a whiteout just a short distance from a supply drop. Oates, it later emerged, couldn’t stand Scott and blamed him for inadequate preparations.

The person I ended up most taken with, however, was not Gilbert White or an Oates, but a man named Herbert George Ponting, who was the official cameraman to the Scott expedition. Though an accomplished photographer, Ponting knew nothing about motion pictures—hardly anyone in 1910 did—but he learned through trial and error, and in the process produced some peerless footage of Scott and his team training for their epic expedition at their Antarctic base camp.