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Green belt is more likely to be wasteland than a slice of countryside

Aerial view of housing beside farmland near Northampton, UK.
Aerial view of housing beside farmland near Northampton, UK. Photograph: Photofusion/REX Shutterstock

Green belts are coming under intense pressure from government plans to build thousands of homes. It conjures up an image of a tide of concrete being poured over beautiful rolling fields of wild flowers, but the original idea of the green belts was to prevent urban sprawl, not for nature conservation or even beautiful landscapes.

Much of the green belt is not even green – 18% is classed as “neglected” with derelict buildings, rubbish, electricity pylons and other blots on the landscape. Only 45% is green and much of that is monoculture farmland too harsh for most wild plants to survive.

There are pockets of botanical interest dotted around green belts, though, and the number of sites is increasing. Derelict land has been restored into wild spaces with 48 local nature reserves created on green belt land since 2009. Priest Hill Nature Reserve in Ewell, Surrey was a derelict sports complex before hundreds of tons of rubble and tarmac were removed and the land restored to chalk grassland with wild flowers.

Rainham Marshes in east London was a military firing range, off limits to the public for 100 years, and transformed into an RSPB nature reserve rich in wetland plants. The Dearne Valley in the South Yorkshire Green Belt is transforming a coal mining area into green spaces and nature reserves of wetlands and wild flower meadows.

And not only fields have been restored – six different green-belt regions have Community Forests, including the largest area, around Bristol, where the Forest of Avon covers half the green-belt land incorporating ancient woodlands and new tree plantations.