Britain’s prettiest villages becoming ‘rich people’s ghettoes’
Mark Shucksmith is one of the best and most passionate speakers on rural issues on the circuit. He also happens to be the keynote speaker at our free Localism seminar in Newcastle on 12 June – more details from wendy.Cooper@sparse.gov.uk
If you are able to come you will no doubt wish to discuss his latest views on the housing crisis in rural England. This article sets the scene, explaining:
“Figures show average house prices in some hamlets are almost 11 times people’s income. Young people are increasingly being forced to move away from villages where their families have lived for generations as price rises turn them into exclusive “playgrounds” for the wealthy, according to Prof Mark Shucksmith.
And he warned that campaigns, often led by well-off new residents, against plans to build cheaper – and potentially less picturesque – housing for local people are threatening to “kill our villages”.
Unless well-off people who move in allow more affordable housing to be built they will condemn those villages to terminal decline, he said. Prof Shucksmith, the director of the newly opened Institute for Social Renewal at Newcastle University, sat on an inquiry panel in the Government’s Commission for Rural Communities, which examined the crisis in the countryside.”