The rate of urban growth at the expense of agricultural land should not be exaggerated. Between I96o and I965 it amounted to about 44,000 acres a year in Great Britain. This scale of loss is a third less than the peak attained in pre-war years and, although there have been considerable annual fluctuations in the post-war period, no sustained increase in the rate of transfer has been evident.Notable contrasts in urban growth exist between and within different regions of the country, the highest land demands being concentrated along a belt running from Lancashire to London. From I96o and zooo it is estimated that the total urban area of England and Wales will extend by a further x,6oo,ooo-i,7oo,ooo acres, but it will then still only cover x5-I6 per cent. of the whole land surface. A comparison is made with the United States where about I,ooo,ooo acres annually are being transferred into urban use.The two decades which have elapsed since the end of the second world war have been marked, in terms of land use, by a considerable extension of urban land in this country. In the earlier post-war years, there was a backlog of wartime damage and restriction of building to make good with new housing estates and new towns; while, after the early x95o's, increasing affluence and birth rate, mounting car ownership, and redevelopment 'overspiU' spread the boundaries of towns still further afield into the countryside.Yet the growing extent of urban land and the corresponding displacement of farmland should not be exaggerated. At the present rate of urban growth it would take more than a thousand years to submerge the remaining British countryside completely under a rising tide of bricks and concrete--not just a few decades as we are so often led to believe. But having said this, it is nevertheless quite evident that there are important regional contrasts in the scale of urban growth; and, even taking the country as a whole, Britain is not so liberally provided with resources of land that planning policies can afford to neglect the many sound and important principles of rural conservation.
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