Join Us
We are ordinary people who campaign to protect rural England; our resources are our members and our funds we raise from members and by mounting appeals.
The single issue that threatens the countryside more than any other is the Regional Assembly’s plan to build nearly 100,000 houses around Bristol and Bath, mainly on green fields. This is part of a much larger encroachment, in the whole of the South West where the government want over 500,000 houses built in the next 20 years. These houses are in addition to those included in current or emerging local plans.
For Avonside at 30 houses per hectare this means over 3,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of countryside disappearing under houses. There will be even more land taken for schools, shopping malls, roads, industrial estates and other infrastructure. If this is allowed to go ahead large areas of our countryside will be lost forever.
Such developments will add more traffic to the already congested local roads and sow seeds for social and other future problems.
Are these developments necessary?
CPRE questions whether all these houses are really necessary; 100,000 houses equates to 250,000 people – where are they coming from? Why cannot more of the houses be built within existing urban areas? Where are the jobs for these people?
CPRE believes that developments should have an individual character, encourage community development and be places where people want to live and love to live. Recent large-scale developments in Avonside have not met these criteria.
Currently Avonside CPRE with other bodies and local citizens are formulating plans to mount a sustained and effective campaign against this destruction of our countryside.
Please join us and help campaign against this ill thought out proposal.
We cannot do it alone.