Villages should unite

Exactly 40 years ago I helped form a local preservation society, when there was still a theoretical possibility of protecting the separate identity of local garden villages and towns.

Building took place a small number at a time. Today, vast and densely-built estates barely raise a comment. Every local plan since 1929 has been a stopgap, limiting the area of development only until the next time.

That part of Arun, west of the river and below the South Downs National Park, has become a conservation basket-case. A residual pocket of land ripe for development. An excellent national park, in conjunction with a free market, will allow commerce to profit from coastal growth, while those involved and the affluent generally move to the countryside.

Arun plainly admits that current free-market schemes do not cater for required social housing, now left outstanding as a reason to extend the built area. More cemeteries will be needed. Roads and traffic are increasing problems.

Traffic today is in perpetual snarl-up, especially at rail crossings, but improved traffic arteries ruin countryside and villages. The roads are now little better than routes out of the neighbourhood.

There is government and Arun obsession with unsustainable economic growth, exacerbated by population increase fuelled by immigration. Population is forecast to increase 60 per cent over what it was, locally far more. We need an economy that will employ a stabilised resident population, and seasonal workers, leaving wealth to grow through scientific progress.

Much of our “garden village” development took place in the early and mid 20th-century. Today, this elderly housing, along main roads of villages which define village character, is being re-developed for commercial profit. The result is a rash of over-large, multi-storey blocks set in bare car parks.

A smaller population, with more space, would be far happier in single-storey apartments with gardens. Ordinary estates are like car parks with houses, with gardens paved.

Every new government has to vaunt “new ideas”, but if the “Big Society” had useful meaning it would be simple localisation. What is promised smacks of covert privatisation. Genuine local responsibility has to be vested in entire communities, villages and towns, above any commercial or narrow interest.

Littlehampton has been called an “expanding community”, but human communities are essentially small. A conurbation is not and never will be a sensible community.

People move here, because it is where they can find housing, having left parts of the country that have already been spoilt.

R. W. Standing,

Sea Road,

East Preston