I'm not sure if that's an urban legend though. I can't find any references to that line of reasoning in historic recounts of Colonel Light's initial plans for Adelaide.
Every single maintenance shed is the collapse of the parklands. It's not worth the fight.
The park lands and the botanical gardens are an absolute treasure that should be preserved. Dont turn the place into another Melbourne or Sydney.
I've moved to Tokyo which takes the opposite approach - indefinite sprawl, barely regulated at first - and the result is actually a city that's much more pleasant and walkable. Small parks mixed among the housing, where they can actually be used, are much better than a big ring of parkland that only the rich can even take the time to visit.
Expanding into the greenbelt is just lazy development that would increase London's existing problems (car traffic, air quality, sprawl).
... and there are plenty of small neighbourhood parks in London! I can't imagine that you're ever more than 5-10 minutes walk from one.
It's not either/or. At the level of housing demand that London has, we need to build everywhere.
> Expanding into the greenbelt is just lazy development that would increase London's existing problems (car traffic, air quality, sprawl).
There's no reason building in the greenbelt would be worse for car traffic or air quality - indeed there are quite a few places where there's already a railway or underground station, but no houses get built because it's greenbelt.
> ... and there are plenty of small neighbourhood parks in London! I can't imagine that you're ever more than 5-10 minutes walk from one.
Clearly you've never been to Tottenham. (There was a "green" on paper, but it's just a square of grass next to a main road. The marshes are lovely if you can get out to them, but they weren't somewhere you could stop off on the way home from work).
It’s not a perfect square belt, in the north it’s quite a bit thicker but there’s the Zoo and University campus etc.
It’s really pleasant and the most expensive real estate lies outside the borders of the parklands.
There's a simple solution. It's not sprawling suburbia, it's to build London at an appropriate density for a global city.
Westminster (with plenty of green space including Hyde and Regents Parks) has a population of 123 per hectare.
If London matched that throughout its area there would be room to double London's population with another 10 million people. If Inner London alone was increased to Manhattan density, that alone would house 5 million more people.
But then things like this happen
https://www.onlondon.co.uk/will-grant-shapps-get-away-with-b...