The case for ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness’
I was leaving the car park of my local shop yesterday – a manoeuvre which involves a hair-raising reverse on to a busy road – when a thought struck me. ‘There’s no chance anyone would get planning permission for a shop here today.’ Either someone from the council would declare there was no safe vehicular access, or else neighbours would complain about the noise. Failing that, someone else would find that the marshland behind the site was the breeding ground for some rare but disgusting toad, or complain that a sweet shop could not open within a parsec of a primary school. You know something has gone wrong when Crawley
