A media phenomenon

A phenomenon familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in the press and media is some people’s ability to use their contacts to advance ideas that really have no substance. Planning history is littered with them – the “third garden city”, Hook New Town, the Buchanan Report or even the 1937 Master Plan for London which would have knocked most of it down…

Planning visionaries, the ones who fantasize about new towns anyway, are usually dangerous. Some in the planning profession still revere Ebenezer Howard, without really considering the full implications of his ideas.

Yes, he was one of the Edwardian idealists whose work led to the modern planning system and we should credit him for that. But his lofty ideals about communitarian governance got nowhere and all his plans to demolish our existing cities achieved was creation of the garden suburb ideal, very profitable for builders and hugely consumptive of our vital countryside for over 100 years of low-density, car-dependent, sprawl.

Now another would-be guru is at it again, calling in every favour from the contacts in his former life. Shiv Malik may have been a successful journalist and plainly still has a very full contacts book with which he can promote a truly dreadful plan to dump a Birmingham-sized city on some highly productive agricultural landscape on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.

I probably don’t need to explain “Forest City 1” as readers of The Financial Times, The Independent, The Sun, the BBC Website and many other outlets will have already come across it.

It doesn’t lack ambition – 400,000 homes with a million inhabitants excreted on 18,000 hectares of our food-insecure country’s most productive farmland, at a site far from the infrastructure or public transport associated with existing cities. The promoters also claim to include a 4,800 hectare “forest”, though the rough plan they supplied the FT suggested that, very far from being a forest, it would be strips of suburban parkland surrounded by development.

Their imprecisely located site between Newmarket and Haverhill is relatively sparsely populated, but much of it is highly valuable Grade 2 farmland. Its current population is small, but despite Mr Malik’s claim to have been enjoying two-hour chats and home-made cake with many of them, most of them are up in arms.

Other than a lot of media noise, however, it’s difficult to see why anyone is taking the idea seriously. Presumably one of the big local land owners is salivating over the huge uplift in land values involved.

Yet despite the promoters spouting lots of current Treasury buzz-words – “new town”, “development corporation”, “vast numbers of homes” etc., even the Government isn’t impressed. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook this week told a Commons adjournment debate on the idea, it has no current plans to back the project.

Meanwhile Mr Malik and his lobbyist chum Joe Reeve will continue to pursue every gullible media outlet they can find. Perhaps they will even explain how the reservoir they plan to supply Sprawl City 1 will be supplied with water in a region already chronically short of it.

But at least they could take a leaf out of the Milton Keynes playbook and name their city after a local village they plan to engulf.

“Westley Waterless City” has a pleasingly accurate sound to it.

Jon Reeds