The Land Britain from Above


The Land

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This vintage Tiger Moth first took to the air in the late 1930s

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and flew out over the wide, flat lands of East Anglia.

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70 years ago,

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this corner of England looked very different.

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Since then, what was once a quiet, rural backwater

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has been transformed... by a farming revolution

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that swapped men for machines...

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...By a transport revolution

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that brought airports and motorways...

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..And by changes in the way we live and work

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that have steadily been covering the land with houses and towns.

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This is a story of change that's common to much of rural Britain,

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but is seen most dramatically here in East Anglia.

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And most clearly from above.

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It is the story of how we have changed and continue to change

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this green and pleasant land.

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It's aviation that's given us a way

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to understand East Anglia's transformation.

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And there's one man who's watched it unfold from the air -

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Bill Ison - at 89, Britain's oldest flying instructor.

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My first flight ever

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was 1931.

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I was wearing my first pair of long trousers.

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And for half a crown,

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this gentleman offered to fly me round in the Gypsy Moth.

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Fascinating. I couldn't believe I was up in the air.

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A lot of green fields.

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Very little in the way of human habitation.

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Cambridgeshire was fairly, um... verdant, shall we say?

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Yes...

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I wouldn't realise at the time

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that things were gonna change as they have over the years.

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In the '30s, hardly anyone bothered to record the landscape from the air

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because there was little reason to believe it would change.

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It took a world war to give us the first comprehensive aerial record.

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Archaeologist Chris Going

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has discovered a unique collection of photographs

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that capture much of East Anglia from the air,

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taken by German bombers on their way to attack RAF bases

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at the start of World War Two.

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What they reveal, effectively by accident,

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is a vast area of the country that has no major city,

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no large industry or anything like an airport,

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no substantial road link to London and beyond.

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In fact, little except small villages and endless farms.

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By starting to take vertical air photographs in the late 1930s -

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'39, '40 -

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the German air force created for us an incomparable archive,

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a huge record of a landscape about to disappear.

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This is a lost world, frozen in time.

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But we can see how it functioned and why it had to change

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thanks to these -

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a unique set of beautifully crafted land-use maps from the early 1930s.

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These are just a few of the original 22,000 sheets,

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each one created by hand by a quarter of a million volunteers.

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Almost all of them were schoolchildren,

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sent into the countryside to record and describe

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every single piece of land in their neighbourhood.

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The entire project was dreamt up

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by geography professor Lawrence Dudley Stamp,

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a man obsessed with protecting Britain's agricultural land

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from urban sprawl.

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And what he created

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was, in effect, Britain's first comprehensive land-use survey

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since the Domesday Book.

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We were mapped by the Ordnance Survey,

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so we knew where things were,

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we knew where the towns, the roads and the railways and the woods were.

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But we didn't know about the white space on the maps,

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which is the bits in-between.

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It was the first time we really had a record

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at this level of detail of what every single field,

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every single parcel of land, was being used for.

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Dr Ruth Swetnam is one of Britain's leading experts on landscape change

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and has been studying Stamp's maps

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to see exactly how East Anglia's land was being farmed

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in the 1930s.

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Looking here at an area around Ely, on the edge of the Fens,

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and we'll put the jigsaw back together.

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of this astonishingly complex landscape.

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It really would have been

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a very much more mixed farming system than we would see today.

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We've got wheat, beet, potatoes, celery, mangolds, lettuces.

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Enormous variety of crops being grown,

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and they were all inter-leaved with each other.

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Very dense, complex pattern of land ownership

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and land use, really.

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The farms were very much smaller.

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They'd have one field here, another field over here.

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To modern eyes, it looks totally inefficient,

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and in many ways, it was.

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The village of Stuntney, in the Fens,

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was a typical 1930s farming community.

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This is the same village today,

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dominated, as it was then, by Stuntney Hall Farm.

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The first recorded owner of the farm was one Oliver Cromwell,

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in the 1640s,

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and by the 1930s, it hadn't really changed that much

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in the way it worked.

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This farm was, um...

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basically worked by vast numbers of people and horses.

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We would have been employing about 100 men and women on this farm.

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Virtually everything was hand work, a lot of what we call "piece work" -

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you get paid by the amount of work that you did.

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And the working day was a hard day.

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There was a lot of ditching work - that was done by hand.

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There was work...

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There was a lot of work.

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Among Chris Going's aerial photos, are a series which show

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quite how much time and effort went into a single harvest.

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The harvest has just taken place. There are three fields here.

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Here we've got, the shocks of wheat have been cut by hand,

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but they haven't yet been gathered into stooks,

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so that happened very recently.

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You cross the road and you can see a large hay cart

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and a horse in front,

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and it's slowly going round the field.

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You can see where they've gathered up all the shocks.

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Half of the field has been done. The other half remains to be done.

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There's another day's work, two days' work, to be done there.

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The landscape you're looking at here

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is a landscape that's being farmed in, effectively, a medieval manner.

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-DR RUTH SWETNAM:

-We'd gone through the industrial revolution

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but we hadn't really gone through the modern agricultural revolution

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at that point.

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Farming was not highly mechanised.

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There were very few tractors.

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I mean, in the early '30s, probably about only one in 15 farms

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had any access to a tractor.

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They were very rare.

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In the late 1930s,

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over a million people worked on the land as labourers -

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a fifth of the working population -

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yet farming was so inefficient,

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Britain still imported 90% of its grain, mostly from Canada.

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You have to remember, in 1930,

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that, um, we did still have a huge empire,

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and we were importing a large amount of our food from the empire,

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and there was no incentive at that time

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for farmers to invest in agriculture,

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because, for the United Kingdom, it was cheaper to import food

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from these large bread-basket nations,

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and so the agriculture in the 1930s was really at a very low point.

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And then everything changed.

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When war broke out in 1939,

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Britain suddenly found its essential food supplies

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cut off by German blockade.

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But beyond the propaganda lay a serious issue.

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If we were going to produce food in any new quantity,

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we needed more than allotments -

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we needed to change the nation's agriculture.

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And Stamp's maps showed precisely where to do it.

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The Government weren't really that interested when he first started.

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It was only when they found out that over 5,000 of these field maps

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had been called in by the War Agricultural Executive Committees,

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which were these bodies which were trying to improve agriculture at county level,

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that they suddenly realised how important they were

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and funded the publication of the whole series.

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While in towns and cities one and a half million people

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worked on their allotments,

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out in the countryside,

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over 300,000 unproductive farms were targeted for direct government aid,

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and, effectively, commandeered.

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An additional five and half million acres was identified

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as capable of growing crops.

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200,000 more labourers and 50,000 new tractors

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eased the workload.

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And in five years,

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food production almost doubled.

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Yet while the nation was trying to feed itself,

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there were new demands being placed on the land.

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To fight the war,

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Britain suddenly needed to build airfields.

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Between 1939 and 1945,

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600 new airfields sprang up almost overnight across the UK,

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and the greatest proportion of these were in East Anglia,

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because this was the largest, flattest piece of land

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close to the Continent.

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In 1942 alone,

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a new airfield was being started here every three days.

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Mostly for the newly arrived American air force.

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For three years, they used East Anglia

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as an unsinkable aircraft carrier

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to launch daily raids on the enemy.

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But the cost was extraordinarily high.

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One plane in six was shot down.

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And the ones that survived

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were often so badly damaged, they barely made it home.

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Those that did

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would often be diverted to one airfield in particular

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with an extra-long crash runway.

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It was called Stansted.

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Stansted's mile-and-a-half of concrete became the saviour

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for many thousands of American airmen,

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grateful to be home in, more or less, one piece.

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After the war, dormant airfields littered

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the southern half of Britain and East Anglia in particular.

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The question was,

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what to do with them.

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In the years that followed, some remained in military use.

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Many returned to their original farm owners

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to be ploughed back into farmland.

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But there was another obvious possibility -

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to turn some of these old wartime airfields

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into new peacetime airports.

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Among the candidates, Stansted looked just about perfect.

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With its super-long wartime runway, it was already capable

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of taking the new, large, post-war passenger aircraft.

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And in the first package flight boom of the early '60s,

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Stansted looked set to become London's third airport.

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By 1967, there were plans to expand into the surrounding countryside,

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and the villages and farms

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that would need to be bulldozed were identified,

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but the villagers and the farmers fought back.

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In a rare success for the protesting public,

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the Government unexpectedly changed its mind

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and Stansted was abandoned as London's third airport,

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at least for the time being.

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Meanwhile, East Anglia's farmers were being encouraged

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to do some expanding of their own.

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During the war, this country, and the rest of Europe as well,

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very nearly starved because of the U-boats.

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So immediately after the war,

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all the politicians in Europe, including British politicians,

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went out to farmers and said, "For goodness' sakes, never again

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"are we gonna be dependent on outside sources for food - grow more food!"

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The farmers said to the politicians,

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"Hang on, we're not as dumb as we look.

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"We know perfectly well

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"that if we have a big harvest and produce more food,

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"the price is gonna go down."

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To which the politicians said,

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"Relax, chaps, that will never happen,

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"because if it does, we, the Government, will guarantee

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"to buy those surpluses from you at a price that gives you a profit."

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For the first time ever,

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farmers could afford the cost of mechanisation.

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In the three decades following the war,

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investment in farm machinery rose tenfold.

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And as a result, food production increased by a further 200%.

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But in all this endless industrialisation,

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the land itself had to change.

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To accommodate the fleets of giant machines,

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average field size tripled.

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And to make way for bigger fields,

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more than 12,000 miles of hedgerow were grubbed up.

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And there was also a human cost.

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In the space of a single generation,

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tens of thousands of farming jobs disappeared.

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For this reason, not everyone embraced the revolution.

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On their family farm near Ely, the Morbeys resisted modernisation

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for as long as economics would allow.

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We've had people working on this farm, and their families,

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going back generations.

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The Fretwells, the Murfitts,

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the Veneys, the Ramseys.

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All these names, they're all repeated back.

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If you looked in the school records, you'd find, you know,

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you'd find those family names going back several generations.

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There is a sense of, um... loyalty, if you like.

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It took Anthony Morbey's father until 1967

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to finally bow to economic pressure

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and become one of the last farms in East Anglia to mechanise.

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They still keep 16 horses, but they're only for show.

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And where they once employed an entire village-full of people,

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the Morbeys now have one single full-time employee

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and a few local contractors to work the same 3,000 acres.

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By the early 1980s,

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the old way of life in East Anglia had finally disappeared,

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and not everyone mourned its passing.

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We used to employ, when I was a little boy, 80 farm workers.

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They lived in all of our cottages.

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They didn't have running water, they didn't have indoor toilets,

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they had terrible pay,

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the conditions they worked in were vile -

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dust, cold, hot, outside in all weathers.

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And therefore in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s,

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the one single ambition of anybody who worked in agriculture,

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in the good old days,

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was to get the hell out of agriculture,

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into any job, any factory job,

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because it was preferable to working on farms.

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For 40 years after the war,

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the working countryside of East Anglia effectively emptied.

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Many smallholders simply gave up,

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and their old farmhouses disappeared

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to make way for more grain production.

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Meanwhile, outside in the wider world,

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other forces had been at work,

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bringing new people into East Anglia -

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city people.

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MAN: 'The town was now unhealthy and crowded.'

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After the war,

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the Government had recognised a new threat to the rural landscape -

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the endless urban sprawl from the big cities, especially London.

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'In fact, our town has turned into a monster!'

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The clever solution they came up with

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was to create a green belt around the city

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and then plant brand-new towns in the open farmland outside.

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Flat and sparsely populated,

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East Anglia was the perfect place

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to begin the great post-war rehousing experiment.

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Harlow became East Anglia's flagship new town in the early 1950s,

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taking 80,000 grateful refugees

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from the smoky misery of bombed-out London.

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Peterborough, Stevenage and Basildon were all modelled on the same idea -

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a carefully planned, self-contained community

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with its own industry, infrastructure,

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and above all, the promise of a bright new future.

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MAN: 'A great effort was made

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'to provide prospects as well as present jobs.

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'Provision was made for the individual of moderate means

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'to start on his own from scratch.

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'For the enterprising, the chance was there for him to take.'

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But these new towns were just the start

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of East Anglia's urban invasion.

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Because at the same time,

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another force was growing that would bring even more people -

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the rise and rise of the motor car.

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In the last 60 years,

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the UK has built 60,000 miles of new road network,

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connecting all its major cities and opening up the rural landscape.

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This is the stretch of farmland reaching north

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from London into East Anglia before the war.

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And this is the same stretch today -

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the M11 corridor connecting the region to London and beyond.

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What's clear is that this is not just a road through a wilderness.

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The M11 has become a main artery into East Anglia,

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stimulating development

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and bringing a new, wealthier breed of resident...

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..The commuter.

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When I was a little boy,

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we used to own 80 different cottages in the surrounding villages,

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and if somebody offered you 100 quid for them,

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you were happy to get rid of them,

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because they were a pain in the neck to maintain.

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Today they're lived in by commuters, minimum price £300,000,

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and they all leave in their Rovers and Jaguars at 7.30 in the morning

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to go off to the City of London.

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Of course, all the commuters wanted to live in the same kinds of places,

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East Anglia's nice old villages and market towns.

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And in the last 50 years, many of these have burst their banks

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under the sheer weight of new housing,

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driven by a regional economy which itself is in transformation.

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Nothing shows this more clearly than Stansted Airport.

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Stansted handles 23 million passengers a year,

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a tenth of Britain's total,

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and has now, finally,

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become London's third international airport.

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Having emerged from nothing before the war,

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finally overcoming objections along the way,

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today it occupies a site of more than 3,000 acres

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on what was once prime farmland.

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3,000 acres is only the size of a single arable farm,

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and Stansted directly employs 12,000 people -

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rather more than any arable farm ever did.

0:22:520:22:54

Today, there are plans for a new runway and further expansion

0:22:540:22:59

to 35 million passengers a year.

0:22:590:23:02

And as East Anglia's economy grows,

0:23:070:23:09

currently faster than any other region in Britain,

0:23:090:23:13

the pressures on housing grow with it.

0:23:130:23:15

Green belts are now restricting the sprawl of towns and villages.

0:23:180:23:22

So to fit everyone in,

0:23:230:23:25

the planners and developers are returning to an idea

0:23:250:23:28

from 50 years ago -

0:23:280:23:30

the new town.

0:23:300:23:32

This is Cambourne.

0:23:350:23:39

Where ten years ago there was a 1,000-acre farm,

0:23:390:23:43

there are now 3,000 brand-new houses for 6,000 brand-new inhabitants.

0:23:430:23:50

And when the town's finished,

0:23:500:23:51

there'll be roughly half as many again.

0:23:510:23:54

Though Cambourne is a fraction of the size

0:23:570:23:59

of predecessors like Harlow, the intention's just the same -

0:23:590:24:03

to give people a new life in the country.

0:24:030:24:06

MAN: 'And as each house was built,

0:24:060:24:08

'even before all the services were working,

0:24:080:24:10

'the young pioneers moved in

0:24:100:24:12

'to be neighbours to dust and noise.'

0:24:120:24:14

But where 1950's government sold a vision of a new town

0:24:140:24:17

for a brave new world,

0:24:170:24:19

Cambourne is selling something subtly different -

0:24:190:24:22

all the comforts of the modern world in what feels like an old village.

0:24:220:24:27

Cambourne is based on old English settlements,

0:24:300:24:33

and we've taken here, with a blank piece of paper, the, um...

0:24:330:24:39

benefits of the past, all the good things of the past,

0:24:390:24:43

and the benefits of today's planning and lifestyles.

0:24:430:24:49

We're certainly not creating here an urban, town lifestyle.

0:24:490:24:54

It is very much more akin to a rural lifestyle.

0:24:540:24:59

It's the rural lifestyle,

0:25:010:25:05

or at least a modern version of it, that's the magnet for people here,

0:25:050:25:09

and its pull is getting stronger.

0:25:090:25:11

In the next decade,

0:25:140:25:17

half a million more people are expected to move to East Anglia

0:25:170:25:21

in search of the good life,

0:25:210:25:23

which means East Anglia will need a massive increase in housing.

0:25:230:25:27

There are already plans

0:25:340:25:35

for a neighbouring development to Cambourne just a few miles away.

0:25:350:25:39

And along with the houses will come more roads

0:25:390:25:42

to connect them to new industries,

0:25:420:25:44

which will bring in more people in search of work

0:25:440:25:46

who all have to live somewhere.

0:25:460:25:48

DAVID CHARE: You've got to find the right location,

0:25:500:25:53

close to roads and networks,

0:25:530:25:55

and up and down the country,

0:25:550:25:57

there will be other agricultural fields

0:25:570:25:59

where you could sacrifice those for housing.

0:25:590:26:03

The housing has got to go somewhere.

0:26:030:26:05

Today, East Anglia's farmland is under pressure.

0:26:050:26:10

In the course of his career,

0:26:180:26:19

Oliver Walsten has seen the fortunes of Britain's farmers change

0:26:190:26:23

out of all recognition,

0:26:230:26:24

from the intensive heyday in the '60s and '70s,

0:26:240:26:28

when he made big profits from his big fields,

0:26:280:26:30

through the '80s when supply outstripped demand

0:26:300:26:34

and food prices fell,

0:26:340:26:36

to the point where setting aside land for conservation

0:26:360:26:39

paid better than actually growing food.

0:26:390:26:42

For the last 20 years,

0:26:430:26:44

we've been getting poorer and poorer and poorer,

0:26:440:26:47

and for three out of the last five years, this farm's lost money.

0:26:470:26:50

I'm not telling you that cos I want you to cry,

0:26:500:26:52

I'm just telling it to you as a matter of fact.

0:26:520:26:56

Fertiliser doubled,

0:26:560:26:58

cost of my agrochemicals doubled,

0:26:580:26:59

cost of the fuel that goes into the tractor tripled etc.

0:26:590:27:02

Yet just when we might feel tempted to shed a tear for the farmer,

0:27:020:27:08

the situation's changing again.

0:27:080:27:10

This time, it's not a world war, but a world food shortage

0:27:100:27:14

that's making its presence felt across East Anglia.

0:27:140:27:18

But just like the days of "Dig For Victory"

0:27:180:27:21

it promises to breathe new life into farming.

0:27:210:27:24

Now, all of a sudden, things are looking a lot better,

0:27:240:27:28

and this field here is now worth, I don't know, £150 a tonne -

0:27:280:27:33

very nearly double what it was 18 months ago,

0:27:330:27:36

so all of a sudden, wheat farmers like me are happy.

0:27:360:27:40

Underlying fact will remain -

0:27:400:27:43

the world will need more food than it did last year

0:27:430:27:46

and people will still be saying to me, "Grow as much wheat as you can."

0:27:460:27:49

So the competition for East Anglia's land is intensifying,

0:27:530:27:57

and East Anglia is typical

0:27:570:27:59

of the challenges facing the rest of rural Britain,

0:27:590:28:02

in balancing a set of competing and growing demands

0:28:020:28:06

on a very finite piece of land.

0:28:060:28:08

As farming competes with housing,

0:28:100:28:13

with airports and roads,

0:28:130:28:15

and what remains of any natural wilderness.

0:28:150:28:19

It has been a long journey from the '30s,

0:28:230:28:26

when this was a backward, undeveloped corner,

0:28:260:28:29

but now East Anglia is defining how we see the future of our...

0:28:290:28:34

green and pleasant land?

0:28:340:28:36

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