Anybody else notice in the UK the rapid erosion of the countryside? I'm hardly ancient, but "when I was a lad it was all fields"! In a very short space of time many of these were built on by housing estates. Soon, the "village" was then linked to the neighbouring town by further housing, such that we felt more part of this town than a separate village. Such was the rate of building, the housing inbetween formed a whole new "village" as such and got it's own name. With all the large fields gone, smaller developers then took up the mantle of building - cramming in houses in any tiny strip of land they could find. Even land which was originally allocated as playing fields for the residents of the new housing was built on 10 years down the line. It's now almost a metropolis... queues of traffic, people everywhere, and the associated crime, etc. Oh, and then to top it all off a motorway was built, with an associated factory complex! Sadly, this seems to be the story up and down the country. I've now moved out to a more remote village but even here the number of dwellings in the village has increased by 25% since 2000 alone. It's also ironic that every weekend there is a stream of cars driving through the village to more country areas trying to escape the urban areas, and then late Sunday night they are all heading back again with glum faces! In the future though - will there be anywhere to escape to? I realise people have to live somewhere, but as many of you fellow hippies know... you can't build everywhere! We have "green belt" but nobody seems to worry about developing in there. New housing also brings the need for new infrastructure - so roads either clog up to a standstill or new ones are built - again taking more land. Perhaps the government should look again at 1960's tower blocks. They need not be ugly, and afterall they seem to be reasonably successfull in the US. The UK is such a tiny country, but much of "the country" will be gone at this rate of pace. Fields have always been built on, but it's the speed that worries me!
