Every now and then somebody will ask me where Ripponden is and I tend to reply by saying that if, when driving between Manchester and Leeds, you get to the apocryphal farmhouse in the middle of the motorway and look to the left, you can just about see Ripponden in the middle distance. That section of the M62 is entirely within the Green Belt, which is somewhat remarkable if you can picture it. Indeed, the bench from which I often record my intros and outros to episodes is in the Green Belt, despite Ripponden being a couple of fields away back in one direction and the nearest settlement, Littleborough, being about seven miles in the other direction, with the Blackstone Edge escarpment in between. The fields immediately adjacent to Stafford Towers very definitely do safeguard the countryside from encroachment..., but all the way from Ripponden to Littleborough? All the way from Manchester to Leeds?
Why do I mention this? Well I thought it an appropriate preamble to this episode, which is about your favourite national institution and mine, the Green Belt.
In September 2025 new friend of the podcast Charles Goode, an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Birmingham, hosted an event in Birmingham to mark the launch of his book, which is called “The Green Belt, Housing Crises and Planning Systems”. Charles invited old friends of the podcast Catriona Riddell and Mike Best, and new friend of the podcast James Corbet Burcher, to join him at that event and I invited the four of them to record a conversation about the Green Belt for the podcast a beforehand.
James is a Barrister at No.5 Chambers, and has also recently written a book about Green Grey Belt, Catriona, strategic planning doyenne, runs Catriona Riddell & Associates, and Mike, you will know if you listened to episode 130, is now doing his own thing after more than twenty years at Turley.
In a conversation recorded at Birmingham Podcast Studios during the afternoon before Charles’ book launch, the four of them dived as deep into the Green Belt as it might be possible to do.
They talked about the role of Green Belt in the national psyche, how it’s role and perceptions of it’s role change even as policy didn’t; and they asked why do some places have a Green Belt and some places do not.
They talked about strategic planning (obviously...) and they talked about the future of the Green Belt, and the case for a Royal Commission to determine what that might be.
And as well as greenfield and brown development, and white and pink land, they also talked about Grey Belt, hence the title of the episode.
(This is part of a map of London’s Green Belts used in a lecture from JR James at the Department of Town and Regional Planning at The University of Sheffield between 1967 and 1978)
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