This proves it: We need our green spaces – and more of them

I FELT like a criminal – or worse, a Government adviser – as I set off towards the M62 on Monday morning.

It was the day the restrictions on seeing family members had been lifted and at the end of the road, 75 miles away, was my son.

Before setting out we had taken the precaution, Mrs B and I, of seeking reassurance from her brother, who is an epidemiologist and thus more likely than Matt Hancock, we felt, to know what he was talking about. He speaks in sentences, not slogans. Driving to Liverpool would be fine, he said.

Our reunion was oddly anticlimactic. The weeks melted away in moments and it was as if we had never been apart. Yet the day was perfect: the weather, the picnic in the park and, most of all, the family circle rejoined. It had been a long time coming.

As we ate our sandwiches, we surveyed the “new normal” of life taking shape around us. It seemed not very different to the “normal normal” but for one thing – people weren’t talking to each other.

It wasn’t because they were wearing face masks; hardly anyone was. They were just enclosed within their own family units. Anti-social distancing, you might say. This was more noticeable in Liverpool than it would have been in Yorkshire, because people there are more naturally outgoing. It’s not at all unusual to become embroiled in conversation with someone you don’t know. But where there had been warmth there was now withdrawal.

We were in Sefton Park, one of the best municipal green spaces in the country, and it was as alive, as you would expect. People are drawn to nature as bees are to honey, especially when their other avenues of pleasure have been closed off. But it has taken a pandemic for us to realise just how important places like this are to our individual and collective wellbeing.

Not having our city parks would be unconscionable, yet planners have been indifferent to the survival of the smaller but equally important green spaces that separate our towns and villages – and which give Yorkshire in particular its distinctive character.

No fewer than 46,000 new houses are currently proposed on such sites across the Ridings, all of them green belt.

Three-quarters will be too expensive to be considered starter homes, which are the ones we’re short of. Yet at the same time there is space to build 1.1m affordable homes on reclaimed “brownfield” sites across the country.

The figures come from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which reported this week that three people in four now believe that local green spaces, including the countryside next to where they live, should be preserved and enhanced. Quarantine had opened their eyes to its importance, for it had been their sanctuary; perhaps a lifeline.

The CPRE has been saying this for years, but what has changed in this new normality is the number of people who have realised that they were right all along. For too long it has been convenient for planners and politicians to dismiss them as Nimbys, stubbornly opposed to change in their back yard and motivated only by selfishness.

But who is the more selfish: householders driven by concern for their surroundings or property developers in search of a bigger profit margin? Or perhaps council officials who, when faced with a choice, will always take the easiest option?

We should be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the green belt right now – the first was in Sheffield, in response to demands from returning service personnel whom today’s officials would write off as Nimbys – but they are out of fashion. There is a mood in town halls that in a country short of houses these strips of green are luxuries we can no longer afford. The experience of quarantine has proved the very opposite to be true.

Everyone is entitled to green space and we need more of it, not less. And brownfield sites, laid waste by industry and commerce, are ideal places to create it. The provision of affordable houses surrounded by freshly planted trees and grassland should become the new normal for every urban authority, irrespective of pressure from housebuilders who could charge more in Harrogate than in Hunslet.

Back in Liverpool, our son took us to the patch of green that had been his own sanctuary. It wasn’t huge but it was there. The legacy of our experience these last few months must be to ensure that plots like it always will be.

Affordable houses with freshly planted trees should become the new normal for urban authorities.