Daily Telegraph: "Hands Off Our Land: the 'huge' lobbying war chest behind the builders"

Link to Daily Telegraph

"Sir Simon Jenkins, the National Trust’s chairman, said the 'fingerprints' of rich builders were all over the planning reforms, which campaigners say will give developers carte blanche to build on large parts of rural England. 

" 'We are up against some very rich and powerful people,' he told MPs on a Commons committee investigating the planning reforms. His comments come amid growing concerns about the influence of lobbyists and business figures on ministers and government policy."

Daily Telegraph: "MPs to air planning law reforms frustration"

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"MPs will get their first chance to vent their constituents’ frustration with the Government’s controversial changes to the planning laws in Parliament this week.

"House of Commons business planners have scheduled a 'General debate on National Planning Policy Framework' on the floor of the House of Commons for Thursday."

BBC: "A Point of View: In praise of wind turbines"

Link to BBC Web site

The countryside is often a man-made landscape, not a natural idyll, and wind turbines are just part of that tradition, writes Will Self.

"It was that arch-conservative GK Chesterton, inveighing against the rural purists of his own era, who said:

"The artificial is, if anything older than the natural. ... In the middle of the wildest fields, the most rustic child is, ten-to-one, playing at steam engines."

"He understood intuitively what the work of Oliver Rackham, that great historian of the British countryside, subsequently established factually - that the pattern of land use we see the length and breadth of these isles is as much a human artefact as Stephenson's Rocket."

Daily Telegraph: "Planning minister Greg Clark faces opposition from his own council in Tunbridge Wells"

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"Conservative-controlled Tunbridge Wells Borough Council this morning voted to accept a report from its own planning officials calling for reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework.

"The study will now be sent to Mr Clark, who is MP for Tunbridge Wells, at the Department of Communities and Local Government ahead of the ending of a consultation on the reforms on Monday.

"The draft NPPF, which distils 1,300 pages of planning guidance into as few as 52, writes into planning rules a new “presumption in favour of sustainable development”, without defining clearly what it means."

Barnet-on-Sea

Link to BBC web site

"Semi-detached houses with gardens, clothes drying in the courtyards, walls and well-made streets - Pavlopetri epitomises the suburban way of life. Except that it's a Bronze Age port, submerged for millennia off the south-east coast of Greece.

"This summer it became the first underwater city to be fully digitally mapped and recorded in three dimensions, and then brought back to life with computer graphics."

Mill Hill East plan gets planning permission

Click above for overall plan (PDF file from 2009)
The dustcart depot is bottom-centre.

The Inglis Consortium a group of landowners (comprising VSM Estates, Annington Property and the London Borough of Barnet) has received outline planning permission from the London Borough of Barnet for the redevelopment of its new ''Millbrook Park' ['Mill Hill East' to anyone else] development in London. The site is now expected to be sold on as a phased development. 

Further details, and web site.

Sunday Telegraph: "Bill Bryson warns the Coalition against turning England into a suburban nation"

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"Bill Bryson, US-born, British resident, incurably Anglophile, is warning that the country he loves is at risk of turning into the country he is from thanks to the Government's proposed reforms to the planning laws:

"Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don't find a sense of community in malls. The solution, he suggests, lies in building on brownfield sites, or in Britain's 'very appealing, liveable towns' – with their existing infrastructure and unoccupied properties.

The Government talks as if the planning system is an impediment to growth. I would say it stops foolish or greedy people being rapacious to the built environment."