Time seems to be passing very quickly for me at the moment, and I could hardly believe it when I had to start a new month on My London Diary. So it was perhaps fitting that several of the events I’ve photographed recently have been about time running out for our planet.
June 30 was the last day of a government consultation about what started off as a potentially good idea – eco-towns – but has ended up as an unpopular mistake. Eco-towns were promised to be zero-carbon new developments using brown-field sites and acting as exemplars of ecological development in various ways. But the thinking behind them was never properly explored, and murky compromises with the building industry muddied the original concept, and we ended up with proposals that really looked very little different from other new town developments, largely to be sited on prime agricultural land. Brown-field sites are harder to find and generally give developers more problems.
It was hardly surprising that local protest groups emerged to oppose most of the proposals, nor that most of their opposition was on environmental grounds although probably very few of us welcome development in our own backyards. (I certainly hated it when the council built rather plain flats on the unregistered common land at the end of my garden.)
Certainly I think the strength of the opposition which was demonstrated outside the Houses of Parliament on June 30 will at least worry the government – as should the comments of prominent architects and environmentalists.
More on the story – and of course many more pictures –
in Eco-Towns Scam – Parliament Lobby on My London Diary.
