Michael Dnes

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michaeldnes1.substack.comThe twist in the snailThe snails are on the move - in a good way

23 Dec 2025

The snails are on the move - in a good way michaeldnes1.substack.com/p/the-twist-...

This week the government announced that it wanted to ensure development next to train stations gets an automatic yes. There’s one area near London where that won’t be happening. And it’s home to a motorway that will soon be – by law – beautiful.

2) Actually review the impact of the motorway. And where land is no longer beautiful, free it up for development. Because it includes places that are half-way between Heathrow and Gatwick. Vacant fields that would make great European headquarters for global companies.

And the way you make that happen is you email surreyhillsaonbboundaryreview@naturalengland.org.uk . Normally, these consultations get a few hundred respondents. More people will read this thread and its friends. Let’s make the M25 ugly again.

Fortunately, there is one person who can change this – Emma Reynolds, the Defra secretary of state. There is one last consultation, and in January she gets to decide whether or not to sign off Natural England’s plan. She’s within her rights to say ‘try again’.

I’d politely suggest she send it back, and ask for two things before saying yes: 1) No new AONB designation within 500m of a train station, so the government policy of ‘yes’ really means yes.

I don’t want to come across as hostile to the environment. I get the case for protecting good landscapes. There’s an argument you shouldn’t have a motorway in an AONB. There’s also an argument that you could. But you have to pick one.

Otherwise, you end up with the Orwellian situation of designating a motorway for natural beauty, while also saying they’re unthinkable desecration. And if you do that, you’re not the kind of person who should be standing in the way of the govt’s housing plans.

But this isn’t just a local problem. It goes back to the core of the review. Because when Natural England started out on project to reassess the natural beauty of this area they set a very important rule. We’re going to ignore the motorways.

That’s right. We’re going to designate huge areas as beautiful and protected. But we will give nothing back. Even if it has a motorway in the middle of it. Like any true romance, the M25 only grows more beautiful with age.

And if that report says it’s beautiful, it’s in. Though, oddly, this report misses the fact that they are designating an 8-lane motorway. Which I take to be a triumph of good highway design.

There _is_ an oblique reference in a section marked ‘marginal areas’ that accepts existing transport infrastructure “may undermine perceptions of tranquillity”. Which, on balance, I would agree with.

This bit kind of has to be in. Because without taking a chunk of M25, the AONB cannot acquire a 7 sq mile area to the south. So we’re going to overlook that motorway.

You might ask, how did they justify that? Well, to create an AONB you have to prove the land is beautiful. And, unsurprisingly, there is a requirement for much paperwork They send out a consultant who judges the beauty of the area, and writes a report

This is the stretch in question. It’s a winter shot, so it doesn’t really do justice. In Spring, I imagine the blossom on the trees beautifully complements the bright orange of the emergency refuge area.

To be fair, there are already motorways in AONBs. Sizeable chunks of the M4 go through protected landscapes. But the M25 is a bit extreme. It’s not so much that the motorway goes through the AONB; more like the AONB is retraining as a hard shoulder

Please don’t get me wrong – there are good reasons to protect beautiful landscapes. But it does pose the question ‘what is beauty?’ And in this particular situation, we also have to ask ‘and why does Natural England think the answer is ‘the M25’’?

Not many people think of the M25 as an example of outstanding natural beauty. But actually, from junctions 3-8 it almost all AONB. See the s*b***k for why. But there’s a gap. And this expansion fixes that.

You might think that this seems at odds with the policies of this government – given they wish for 1.5 million homes, and do not consider green belt to be sacred. And you would be right. Because this policy was started in 2021, under the last government.

You might ask whether a general election, a change of government and a substantially different set of policy objectives might prompt a rethink. Evidently not. Because they published the final plans 72 hours after the train station announcement

Take Woldingham for example – currently on the boundary of the AONB (dark green), soon to be fully encircled (light green). The station has a train every 30 minutes to London Victoria. The red line shows the land govt wants to unlock.

Nor is it alone. I see similar stories at Oxted and Chipstead, Coulsdon, Betchworth and Ockley. In Dorking, next to the industrial estate. In Milford, next to the solar farm. I’m sure I’ve missed others.

The government calls this a ‘default yes’. But there are things that will turn this into a default no One of those things is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB/National Landscape). Planning policy says building here should be avoided if possible – which seems reasonable

And around London, Natural England is consulting on taking the AONB nearest to London – Surrey Hills – and expanding it. Which means that there are quite a few train stations around London, in open fields, where development will shortly be made extremely difficult.

Whenever I write one of these, I make sure there are footnotes. You can find them over on the substack, plus some extra detail on how this all came about michaeldnes1.substack.com/p/motorway-o...

gov.ukHousebuilding around train stations will be given default “yes”Housebuilding near well-connected train stations will receive a default “yes” in future if they meet certain rules, ensuring more homes are built

Part of government’s plan to get houses built involves allowing more building near train stations. www.gov.uk/government/n... It’s a big YIMBY cause worldwide to make it easier to build homes near train stations, so the people living there can get to work without driving.

Earlier this week, there was a big twitter debate started by @elidourado.com – are trains part of Abundance or not? And that prompts a much bigger question: why is abundance so loud about trains, and so quiet about everything else?

These things can make tangible improvements to peoples’ lives, and can demonstrate the value of progress in real terms. Just the way other improvements in transport used to do for hundreds of years.

Going faster, higher and further in greater comfort feels like a core mission for abundance. So yes to the trains; but it’s time to start talking seriously about the other stuff too.

Because that compelling urban vision only applies to one part of the world. An important once; but if abundance is going to reach further, it should be able to offer far more. Here in the UK, an electric car done right can cut fuel bills by 80-90%.

Autonomous vehicles could spare Americans from 93 billion hours of drudgery a year. E-bikes, with the right infrastructure, could turn summertime commutes into joy rides. Planes that can outrun Concorde would halve the size of oceans.

In his original tweet, Eli suggested that this job could be done better by autonomous buses and fast planes FWIW, I think this will prove true (when I was the UK’s main road strategist, I had a plan for the buses). But until we prove it, there’s still a job for trains

slowboring.comThe half-drawn horse of abundancePlus: Weezer, Harvard dorms, social mobility, and the first female president

So yes, abundance does need trains, for sure. BUT – the question isn’t why are we talking about trains. It’s why aren’t we talking about anything else? This feels like one of those areas where @mattyglesias.bsky.social is inviting us to ‘finish the horse’ www.slowboring.com/p/the-half-d...

So that leaves us with the railway. Which, for all its limitations, is a powerful people mover. 60 years on, the same area of London is served by Crossrail, which tied together two existing railways to provide it with a 32-train-per-hour rail superhighway.

And if you’re stuck using trains, you also need to understand that trains are hard to build. So if you believe in cities that depend on them, you’re going to need to give a disproportionate amount of attention to making them run.

They looked at an area of central London called Fitzrovia, and tried to work out how it would need to change to deal with the expected traffic. A rise from 3,000 vehicles/hr to 40,000. It was immediately clear that this was impossible.

But they really did try. - Add six 5-lane motorways - Convert the whole ground level to a hexagonal road network - Move the humans and their buildings 20ft in the air - Dig two floors of parking underneath with 60,000 spaces It still wasn’t enough

Well, no. There’s a really good reason abundance likes trains. But it has little to do with transport, and everything to do with cities Abundance really, really loves cities. And in cities, transport gets weird

To explain why, I need the help of the best transport report ever written – the 1963 Traffic in Towns report. Written when British civil servants were just realising that the future was universal car ownership, it’s an unmatched examination of just what that was going to mean.

This is definitely a thing. The #1 transport story of abundance is the failure of Californian high speed rail. The top asks are usually cheap metro systems, light rail networks and high speed railways. The subtext is good trains = civilisation

For you, this may not need explaining. But trains are niche. They were mostly built to enable journeys we can now do in better ways. They need their own network of tracks, so they don’t scale easily. They aren’t cheap. Is this just an unhealthy obsession let loose?

Second: transport is the area where degrowth – the arch-enemy of abundance – holds the most power. We think it normal to e.g. limit road traffic to deliver environmental goals. There are good reasons for that, but they’re the opposite of the abundance mindset.

All that would seem to point to 1. leveraging new tech like modern batteries, autonomous control, drone flight etc and 2. rationalising rulebooks – so billions of people save time and money. So why is so much abundance transport chat about trains?

You should expect abundance to care about transport. First, abundant transport transformed what cities could do: before c.1800 city size was capped at 1m people, and the distances people could walk in c. 1 hour.

Then came the omnibus, the railway, the tram, the automobile. 1m became normal. 10m stopped being incredible. Not only that, cities and nations did things they never thought of before – national newspapers; sports leagues, etc. A perfect demonstration of the power of abundance.

This is definitely an essay question – you can read a fuller answer over on the s*st*k michaeldnes1.substack.com/p/the-abunda... But here’s the summary