Forget the cities - our country paradise is ripe for development

摘要

So now it has happened, entirely as predicted in this column years ago. The super-high-density city proving unpopular - as well as horrendously expensive and as unwieldy as a juggernaut to steer through the planning process - we have reverted to nibbling away at the Green Belt. And so 'protecting the countryside' retreats from being an inviolable principle to an empty slogan backed up by newspaper stories about outraged or distraught country-dwellers gazing out for the last time over green fields they thought they possessed forever.