NEW HOMES AND NO GARDENS

Controversial plans by Labour to exclude The Gardens Trust from the statutory planning process, ostensibly to make new developments easier to green light, threatens the future of our cherished green sites, warn campaigners

- James Knuckey

EVERY week Linden Groves visits her local North London park that holds so many memories, from play dates as a child through to lockdowns, parenthood and more recently, marathon training. The importance of nature was instilled into Linden at an early age growing up in the 1970s, learning from her green-fingered grandmother in her garden and memorable trips to places brimming with flora and fauna.

“They mean everything to me,” Linden tells me, explaining how our rich culture of parks and gardens are as quintessentially British as William Shakespeare, cups of tea and fish and chips.

Linden is one of the UK’s top garden historians but now new Labour plans to speed up the planning system threatens to bulldoze some of the very sites she has dedicated her life to defending.

She says the thought of this is unimaginable but as we chat, there is one phrase she repeats: “Not on my watch.”

“These places, they’re not here by magic, they’ve been carefully created and looked after for hundreds and hundreds of years, and once they're gone, they’re gone,” she says passionately.

“It would be the equivalent of someone clearing out all of Shakespeare’s manuscripts and burning them because they were taking up space. I think we would look back in time and just feel ashamed of what we'd let our generation do.”

Linden works for The Gardens Trust, the UK’s only national charity dedicated to protecting and conserving the heritage of designed landscapes.

In 2024-25, it made almost 70 critical objections to planning applications, including schemes that would have seen more than 1,100 new homes built on or affecting the sites it protects.

But The Gardens Trust warns the UK’s “grown crown jewels” are at risk due to Labour proposals the charity believes are aimed at making PM Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy and Communities Secretary Angela Rayner’s ambitious 1.5 million new homes pledge more achievable.