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Showing posts from May, 2015

The Campaign To Purchase Rural England

If you really cared about something that was under threat how would you go about protecting it? A practical option could be ownership or at least part-ownership, like the campaigners trying to save Ancoats Dispensary in Manchester, or the Pompey Supporters Trust , which took control of Portsmouth Community Football Club. A political option could be a campaign, like the Labour's twenty year fight to save the NHS ... This came to mind at a RTPI-sponsored Green Belt debate at Oxford Brookes University, where the Campaign to Protect Rural England's (CPRE) Head of Planning, Matt Thomson, began his remarks by stating that the CPRE "like to think that we own the Green Belt." The CPRE do not, obviously, own the Green Belt, and instead 'stand up for it' on it's member's behalf, but what if it did? What if, in order to provide a 'beautiful and thriving countryside for everyone' the CPRE started to acquire beautiful land for the benefit of not j