This is how it comes out. The Office for National Statistics Land Use survey puts the built up part of the UK at ten per cent of all land. Farming accounts for three-quarters of all land. Because of increasing yields, around a third of the farm land is surplus to requirement, leading to wholesale land retirement (usually effected by having it re-designated national park, green belt or something similar).
So you could conceivably double - and this is at the outer limits, nobody wants or needs to double - the built up area of the UK - and still reduce the undeveloped land by just one ninth.
Doug assumes that the reason that the suburbs were built was to disaggregate the working class. That seems to be turning reality on its head. The working class was disaggregated, by virtue of its political defeat around the same time that tenure was shifting from rented city apartments to suburban home-ownership. Consequently the political character of the suburbs was more individuated aspirational than it was collective solidarity. The picket fence does not fix capitalist values in the minds of working class people, any more than does the shift from blue to white collars, or does the decline in flat caps and wooden clogs. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061019/5230203b/attachment.htm>