Has England’s green and pleasant land all of a sudden become
England’s green and overcrowded land?
With the nation’s ever-increasing population and the double
whammy that people are now living longer, this means as each year goes by, there
is an ever-growing strain on public services and in particular my favourite
topic - housing. It’s no wonder some people are saying things are at crisis
point when it comes to infrastructure (like roads, schooling etc) and in
particular housing. I hear it all the
time, people complaining that Warrington looks like a building site and, we are
packing people in like sardines into our Warrington homes. Yet I wanted to find
out exactly what the truth was.
Starting with the UK as a whole, there 698 people per square
mile whilst in England, there are 1,103 people per square and finally in
Greater London 14,587 people per square mile
… these all sound quite awful numbers, until you drill down and realise
a square mile is an awfully big area - there are only 93,600 square miles in
the whole of the UK and that includes the wilderness areas of Scotland!
Let’s look at more realistic areas of land ... and I want to
look at my favourite - the acre. To those born after the mid 1970’s, an acre is
roughly half the size of a football pitch or a square roughly 63 metres by 63
metres and there are just less than 2.5 acres in a hectare.
The population of Warrington is 165,456 and the total
area of Warrington is 11,092 acres, meaning 14.92 people live per acre in Warrington
So, how does that compare to neighbouring areas and towns...
As you can see, only just under 15
people live per acre in Warrington, interesting when compared to both Greater
London, which has density of 23.26 people per acre and London’s most crowded
suburb, Pimlico at 92.32 people per acre. Yet even Pimlico is nothing to the Collblanc
district in Barcelona, which has 214.8 people living it per acre.
So, is Warrington over populated? Yes, it seems that way
at school time or rush hour when sitting in traffic that Warrington is over
populated – yet the stats show - we aren’t.
Evidently, we are never going to have an even spread of
population as can be seen from the figures in the table, and the remote nature
of some parts of the Country would not be able to withstand high densities of
new people without enormous infrastructure investment.
Yet could we accommodate a much larger population in the UK
(and Warrington) although there would be trade-offs? Look back at the 17th
and 18th century and certain sectors of society were warning about
population growth. The population of the UK in 1801 was 10.5 million and even
with the growth of the population since then, only 1.2% of the UK is currently built
on for housing purposes.
The question, it seems to me, is not can we manage but
how
would a larger Warrington population change our way of
life,
both for better and possibly worse?
The planners have a responsibility to ensure Warrington provides
its fair share of new homes to accommodate this population growth in the coming
years. The local authority has a responsibility towards adequate provision of
the infrastructure of roads, hospitals and schools etc., to match the growth in
housing. This is not a political topic and I hope once the ‘B’ word is finally sorted
we can get on with addressing the shortage of affordable new homes for future
generations.
Email me on manoj@hamletwarrington.co.uk or call on 01925 235 338 – we are based on the Warrington Business Park, Long Lane, WA2 8TX. There is plenty of free parking and the kettle is always on.
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