Building balance

Rowan Moore (“No place for homes”, Jan/ Feb) perpetuates the misleading habit of referring to those who oppose housing developments as “Nimbies”, as if such opposition is entirely self-centred and all about “Not in My Back Yard”. He writes of a binary struggle between “those who would benefit from new homes and those who want as little change as possible to their views of the countryside.”

That this is an unhelpful oversimplification is clear from Moore’s acknowledgement elsewhere in his article that the big house-building companies prefer to provide lucrative private homes that often do not correspond to priority needs, that much new housing is mediocre and that “the limiting of sprawl and the protection of the countryside are huge successes of the British planning system.” Those successes owe a great deal to the active local citizens who care about those goals, and fight for what they believe is the public interest against inappropriate commercial development applications year in, year out. Dismissing them as Nimbies is inaccurate and insulting.

Moore writes that modern nimbyism has travelled very far from the postwar sense of being all in it together, but the protection of the English countryside featured in wartime propaganda precisely because feelings for it ran so deep; and the cause continues to engender a great sense of national togetherness among those who are determined to maintain our heritage, whether they live in city, town, village or hamlet.

Andrew Purkis, former chief executive, Council for the Protection of Rural England