There is a small town outside of Louth called Manby. It used to be a medium-sized RAF base, which is probably how the village grew into a small town. It was used until relatively recently, but now that the airbase is closed and derelict, Manby doesn’t have much to support it.
That is until the government put it onto a shortlist for eco-towns.
The BBC website says this (in part):
Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, accused the government of “eco-spin rather than a genuine attempt to address the environmental nature of our housing”.
The new environmentally-friendly towns – low-energy, carbon-neutral developments built from recycled materials – will be the first new towns since the 1960s.
The largest will provide between 15,000 and 20,000 new homes, with officials saying the towns should be “zero-carbon” developments and should be exemplary in one area of sustainability, such as energy production or waste disposal.
They also want 30% to 40% of each eco-town to be allocated as affordable housing.
Although I don’t like Labour, at least they’re making a choice and forging a path. I hope they really get this done, and I hope that they will be good examples of sustainability. The reason is because I want to own a home and since these will be “affordable” according to the Labour government this may be the best bet!
The one thing that might put me off moving to Manby is the deplorable state of the public transport in this area. It’s basically non-existant – but if this is supposed to be an eco-town surely that would mean a more developed infrastructure for public transport? Most work would be in Louth, so that would mean a good transport mechanism to travel at least 6 miles, in eco-friendly transports, and fairly cheap.
As you can see the technologies are straightforward and have been around for some time, but putting them all in one package is not something that has been done a lot on a large scale. It should be interesting to see if the local authorities think that this is something worthwhile, and that people would buy the houses (being a very rural area, people tend to think about conservation).
Tags: eco-town, manby
You're absolutely right, we need to iron out the wrinkles in these gigantic projects before we build more than 1 ...