Backyard Builders
With development land in the UK at a premium, home owners all over the country are utilising their own gardens for big gains.
With development land in the UK at a premium, home owners all over the country are utilising their own gardens for big gains.
As farmers and land owners seek to diversify, we look at some of the more interesting ideas for alternative land usage.
"Britain may soon weaken longstanding rules that have preserved "green belts" around towns and cities. A report by the energetic Ms (Kate) Barker, released in December, argued that farms and parks will have to be concreted over to provide living space for an extra 209,000 new households each year over the next two decades. One consequence is that firms may soon be able to buy land in suburb-sized chunks. The potential change has sparked a flurry of interest in land adjoining towns and cities that may be reclassified. That seems to be shifting the balance of power from local builders to large firms with enough capital to buy rights to huge tracts of land. A sign of the shift, says Pete Damesick, head of research at CB Richard Ellis, is that even institutional investors with little previous experience are now getting into the game of speculating on town-edge land"
www.economist.com
