The failure of our planning system for rivers, in one photo. The River Roding through Ilford is in the worst state of anywhere on the river: canalised in concrete, covered in rubbish, polluted with sewage & road runoff & forgotten about. So when a developer was given permission to build flats worth 10’s of millions of pounds right next to it, did @RedbridgeLive ask them to do anything at all to help restore the river? Nope, they just let them build the flats & leave the river to die quietly beside them. The crucial thing they should have asked for here is for the concrete river edge to be set back & naturalised. Had the voice & interests of the River Roding been represented in the planning process, this naturalisation could have been done whilst providing the same amount of housing & would have even made the development more attractive by actually letting people see the river. It is completely possible to protect & restore nature & build more homes, but we need a more imaginative process than whatever allowed this development to be built.

It is no coincidence that bats & newts are receiving flack for supposedly stopping infrastructure, house building & other development. These are some of the only wildlife which has substantive protections, both on the creatures themselves & their habitat. Most other parts of Nature have often worthless procedural protections that can be overridden with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, so that we don’t even usually register their loss. It is usually felt as a mere absence of the vitality, diversity & amount of Nature that people would once have taken for granted, if it is registered at all. It is more than possible to build the housing & infrastructure that Britain needs whilst also protecting & restoring the Nature which also calls these islands home. However, to do so will take thoughtfulness, imagination & effort, qualities which seem in short supply from a government seemingly determined to whack up buildings & lay down concrete without considering the effect on the already damaged & denuded natural world in Britain.