(^170) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
Here, even the smallest houses were provided with gardens, and existing
landscape features were preserved wherever possible: indeed, it is said that
the city was built without felling a single tree.^43 As a result of these ideas, the
extent of green infrastructure came, in some areas and some cases, to be less
closely tied to the social status of an area’s inhabitants.
In the inter-war period, the pace of suburban development accelerated:
indeed, it has been estimated that around a third of the country’s present
housing stock was erected in the 20 years between 1919 and 1939.^44
Increases in car ownership, expansion in bus services, and improvements in
the road network allowed a greater spread of housing, while the development
of faster trains, some of them electric, made commuting over considerable
distances a possibility for many. An expansion in the number of middle
class jobs and the easier availability of mortgages increased levels of home
ownership significantly. This, coupled with the expansion in light engineering
and related activities, ensured rapid suburbanization in many parts of the
West Midlands and the south especially.^45 Much of this took the form of
streets of classic ‘semis’, with gardens larger than those accompanying
earlier artisan terraces although still smaller than those associated with
the larger detached homes, which also continued to be built, often now in
more rural locations close to major rail lines.^46 Little controlled by planners,
houses also sprawled across the countryside more generally, lining major
roads as ‘ribbon development’ in order to reduce the costs of sewering and
electricity supply. In addition, the inter-war period saw an increase in the
numbers of council houses. Legislation to encourage the erection of council
houses had been passed as early as 1890, with the Housing of the Working
Class Act allowing Urban and Rural District Councils to apply for central
government funding to erect houses. But few made use of this opportunity
and it was only in 1919 that the Addison Act made it obligatory for councils
to build houses, and under the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ policy local authority
expenditure on housing was subsidized. Further Acts, in 1923 and 1924,
resulted in a government subsidy being paid on every house built, whether
by local authorities or by private landowners.^47 All this added further to the
area of low-density housing.
garden wildlife
Private gardens had existed in England for centuries, as we have seen, but in
ecological terms their importance now increased considerably simply because
they came to occupy so large a proportion of the country’s land surface.
Together with parks and playing fields, they accounted for nearly a third of the
area of British towns and cities by the 1950s, a total of around 5,000 square
kilometres of land.^48 Domestic gardens were in some ways as unnatural as
the streets and houses which surrounded them, stocked as they were with
plants often ill-suited to local conditions and subject to regular disturbance
elle
(Elle)
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