I’ve reviewed a won­der­ful book on the green belt for the Guardian. Out­skirts: Liv­ing Life on the Edge of the Green Belt is by John Grindrod, author of Con­cre­topia, a cel­e­bra­tion of post­war British archi­tec­ture (“I do love a bit of con­crete”).

Part his­to­ry and part mem­oir, Grindrod’s evoca­tive and intel­li­gent book explores the green belt and its place in our nation­al con­scious­ness. As well as explain­ing the his­to­ry of the green belt, one of the great strengths of the book is that Grindrod tells his own sto­ry of grow­ing up on a coun­cil estate in New Adding­ton, devel­oped dur­ing the 1930s on an exposed Sur­rey hill­top. Grindrod’s fam­i­ly moved from a flat in Bat­tersea to New Adding­ton in 1969: “a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non: the once urban poor trans­plant­ed back to the edge of the city, to the coun­try”. Their home was on “the out­skirts of the out­skirts” and oppo­site the green belt. His broth­er said it was “like every­thing a child could want! There were trees, fields of wheat … It just blew me away.”

Grindrod’s won­der­ful book struck a chord with me. I also grew up on the fringes of Lon­don in the 1970s, near the green belt. My par­ents lived in a rather unlove­ly 1930s semi on the out­skirts of Rom­ford, not far from the rather more desir­able gar­den sub­urb of Gidea Park, which was inspired by Ebenez­er Howard’s ide­al­is­tic vision of a decen­tralised urban future. “Town and coun­try must be mar­ried,” Howard had gushed, “and out of this joy­ous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civil­i­sa­tion.”

As Grindrod shows, it was large­ly Howard’s vision of gar­den cities that inspired the green belt, an urban plan­ning com­pro­mise designed to lim­it the growth of big cities such as Lon­don, a bar­ri­er to save the coun­try­side from an all-con­sum­ing tide of subtopia. I was nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly keen on Rom­ford (although its rau­cous, colour­ful mar­ket was mem­o­rable) but I loved the sense that green spaces were nev­er too far away.

Today 13% of Eng­land is des­ig­nat­ed as green belt – a strik­ing fig­ure when you con­sid­er that only slight­ly more than 2% of land is actu­al­ly built on. But Grindrod shows that we need a new approach to the green belt to deal with the cur­rent hous­ing cri­sis: “To city dwellers, the green belt is tight­en­ing around our throats. To coun­try folk we are igno­rant bar­bar­ians, intent on its destruc­tion.”

Read my review here and do buy Grindrod’s book. You won’t be dis­ap­point­ed…