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I& #39;ve been reading this book lately and it& #39;s absolutely wild https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/An_Anatomy_of_Sprawl.html?id=NlxSSAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">https://books.google.co.uk/books/abo...
for Southampton and Portsmouth comrades, if you want to know how S-P became a conurbation of over 1 million people despite every single plan ever to do so being rejected, this has all the dirt and it& #39;s astonishing
it turns out both Southampton and Portsmouth voted FOR Colin Buchanan& #39;s notorious Solent City plan for uniting the two through a Milton Keynes style grid of infrastructure, but it was veto& #39;d by the boroughs inbetween and Hampshire County Council...
...but in the projected growth in population happened and then some. The process by which this happened is fascinating, a planning failure on every conceivable level, creating so the author argues (and in my experience, correctly) the only true US-style sprawl in UK
the issue appears to have been a) the obsession with preserving rural mid-Hants from development at all cost, b) insane local fiefdoms - Fareham and Gosport literally demanding a & #39;Greater Fareham& #39; and & #39;Greater Gosport& #39; rather than becoming part of Soton or Portsmouth...
c) those councils being absolutely fine with development as long as it& #39;s not for the poors, and d) bizarre imagined communities emerging out of nowhere in mere months
the biggest areas - many of them the size of entire cities - are the & #39;Fareham Western Wards& #39;, Locks Heath, West End, Hedge End in 60s/70s, Chandlers Ford and Boyatt Wood around Eastleigh, then Whiteley and Waterlooville - all have semi-rural gaps between them....
....which their local councils and campaign groups obsessively protect, in order to preserve the fiction that they& #39;re real villages and market towns rather than what they are, which is Bovis housing estates
the original Buchanan plans involved of course a grid of expanded road and rail transport networks to serve all of the expected growth. Rejecting the plan meant what didn& #39;t happen was the infrastructure, not the growth
the quotes from planners and councillors in there are crazy - one basically confirms that Hampshire had a & #39;divide and rule& #39; policy to stop Portsmouth and Southampton from becoming more powerful than Hampshire CC and its sub-units like Fareham, Eastleigh, Winchester
* (Winchester City Council covers an area about five times the size of eg Portsmouth City Council. Populations - 45,000 and 240,000, respectively)
