What percentage of England is "overcrowded"?

sheffield_lad

1. Bangladesh
2. The Palestinian territories
3. Taiwan
4. South Korea
5. The Netherlands
6. England

zagubov

I'm an incomer in London /SE England and don't know the area's history but my impression is that its growth has been unplanned and organic and has no rationale behind it. The result is a transport-unfriendly mess. I'm not happy at saying this. My family are Londoners.

Loads more people get a house instead of a flat but the house has a postage-stamp garden you can't use for anything. We put a trampoline in our garden and half of the garden disappeared. Parking's a struggle and getting from A to B's fine on certain transport corridors and a major headache anywhere else.

Aberdeen's the one city in Scotland I've never spent any time in, but if it's anything like the other Scottish cities there'll be wide roads, lots of parks, and massive amounts of people living in low-rise or even high-rise flats, many of them very spacious.

If you build upwards you have space to develop transport. London doesn't have that and neither do the Home Counties. The train system's at full capacity already. I've seen tube trains I'd never manage to squeeze into, they're already packed in like sardines.

Where I live they were going to extend the district line but decided to terminate it in Wimbledon instead. Huge chunks of the transport network don't cross the river- the tram network only meets the underground network at Wimbledon and there's no overlap.

You could do great things to make London more liveable and expandable but it would involve massive bulldozing and rebuilding and nobody could ever get away with that in a million years.

chewmylegoff

I find the premise used in the link to formulate a claim that only 2.5% of land is built on, and the resulting claim that Britain is not overcrowded to both be difficult to understand.

If 10% of our land area is urban, that means 10% of it is urban. The fact that some urban space is gardens, rivers, sportsgrounds allotments and parks doesnt mean the space is not utilised and is available for building on. These are all necessary parts of urban space. The idea that you could stick 4 times more people in the same space is no doubt theoretically true but it would be an absolute disaster in terms of quality of life if you did do that.

Surely the way to measure whether a place is overcrowded is to look at its infrastructure, not the number of gardens that hae had tower blocks built in them.

It's difficult to see how you could expand the traffic capacity to cope with 20% increases in population in many of our cities. No doubt we could just build some more in the middle of some farmland or perhaps a national park here or there. But we aren't doing that, at all.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

howee wrote: »

Hang on if we take out small islands, principalities etc we (England), are the 6th most over populated in the WORLD not just Europe.

http://leftoutside.wordpress.com/what-have-immigrants-ever-done-for-us/is-the-ukengland-the-most-densely-populated-country-in-the-world/

From your link....

Now it becomes a little clearer why people bemoaning immigration refer to England; it inflates their figures.

England is a constituent part of the United Kingdom and there are no restrictions of movement on those in the UK so it is dishonest to focus on England and not the whole UK.

In an effort to inflate their figures, those arguing that immigration is dangerous will use the population density of England rather than the whole of the UK.

This is a misleading argument as migrants settle across all of the UK and it is dishonest to use information from part of the UK to dictate policy for the whole country.

For example, despite the fact that the German Land of North Rhine-Westphalia has a population density of 1,300 people per square mile it would be foolish to argue that no migration should be allowed into Germany from the data of one constituent part

Britain is not England any more than Germany is North Rhine Westphalia.

vivatifosi

Nikkster wrote: »

Also who owns these empty spaces? Farmers? I personally think we should be looking to become more self-sufficient as a country and less reliant on imports (food and energy) rather than less.

Me too. It worries me that we only produce 60% of the food we eat.

Dribley

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

I fail to see the point of people describing a country that is 97.5% empty as "full up" .

Mate, it sounds like your brain, mainly empty, but full of !!!!!!.You really are quite thick!

vivatifosi

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

I've found a good place to start is usually all the empty spaces between towns.



Having looked on a satellite map as well, it seems doubtful that even tiny little Hertfordshire, with it's million or so people, is much more than 30% urban space, with maybe half that built on.

It's all very well to look at green dots on a map, but they don't represent the actual places. Drive from Watford to Bushey or Rickmansworth and you'll see very little gap between the towns. St Albans and Hatfield have almost joined together and there isn't that much space between Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City.

Similarly Watford, St Albans and Hemel Hempstead; three of the biggest towns and forming a triangle with each other, but the towns have converged along many routes, effectively joining the towns and villages that were distinct together or with very small gaps between.

Though I will grant you that in the north east of the county there is a bit of space. A bit like in the whole of Aberdeenshire.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

chewmylegoff wrote: »

It's difficult to see how you could expand the traffic capacity to cope with 20% increases in population

Here, let me help you with that.

zagubov

vivatifosi wrote: »

Me too. It worries me that we only produce 60% of the food we eat.

That's not much more than Taiwan, a good bit more than Japan and much less than Germany's 97%- and that's a country that's 1/3 forest and has far more industry and is 12.5% built-up.

Look the 2% figure's meaningless. the urban area is 10%. The non-concreted land is useless. unless we do what Taiwan did and send farmers to grow food in people's gardens.

We can't use canals/parks or people's back gardens for tramlines/cyclelanes train tracks/ roads etc. It's useless land. I've seen loads of gardens/back yards from trains travelling across London. The one thing you never, ever, see is anyone in them, using them for anything.

I'll get pilloried for saying this but the UK needs loads more Milton Keynes. Spacious well-laid out cities with infrastructure planned and already set up.;) Except you need to build in tram networks as public transport's not MK's strong point. and some decent flats.

Nikkster

zagubov wrote: »

That's not much more than Taiwan, a good bit more than Japan and mcuh less than Germany's 97%- and that's a country that's 1/3 forest and has far more industry and is 12.5% built-up.

Look the 2.7% figure's meaningless. the urban area is 10%. The non-concreted land is useless. unless we do what Taiwan did and send farmers to grow food in people's gardens.

We can't use parks or people's back gardens for tramlines/cyclelanes train tracks/ roads etc. It's useless land. I've seen loads of gardens/back yards from trains travelling across London. The one thing you never see is anyone in them.

I'll get pilloried for saying this but the UK needs loads more Milton Keynes. Spacious well-laid out cities with infrastructure planned and already set up.;) Except you need to build in tram networks as public transport's not MK's strong point. and some decent flats.

It could definitely do with trams.... Driving around all those roundabouts is really irritating!