Later this month Hachette will publish Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots. Described by the publisher as ‘a genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect,’ it seems perfectly timed for the ongoing debate sparked by the Labour Government’s decision to allow building on ‘grey belt’ land, which it defines as ‘wastelands and old car parks located on the greenbelt’. Labour said these sites shouldn’t be ‘given the same protections in national policy as rolling hills and nature spots’ that we more commonly associate with the protective band of green surrounding the UK’s major cities.

Brown – and his book – would beg to differ. During the real estate crash of the late 2000s, he purchased an empty lot in an industrial section of Austin, Texas. The property—a brownfield site bisected with an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with concrete debris and landfill trash—was an unlikely site for a home. And conforms exactly with Labour’s notion of ‘grey belt.’ But as with many other similar ‘ruined’ sites in the city that he explored with his son, Brown discovered them to be teeming with natural activity, and embarked on a twenty-year project to live in and document such spaces. His new book is the result. There, we learn, ‘in our most damaged landscapes, he witnessed the remarkable resilience of wild nature, learned how easy it is to bring back the wild in our own backyards, and discovered that, by working to heal the wounds we have made on the Earth, we can also heal ourselves.’

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) is similarly concerned by Labour’s grey belt vision. It worries that the government’s plans could encourage ‘landowners to deteriorate undeveloped land’ in order to build on them. It April this year it stated: ‘While these areas of scrubland may not be as photogenic as wildflower meadows, they could be harnessed to create rich habitats such as wetlands and woodlands, which would benefit local communities, carbon sequestration and flood mitigation, while being accessible for people,’ and argued that its own research ‘has shown that there are enough ‘shovel-ready’ brownfield sites in the UK for 1.2m new homes,’ which would almost fulfil Labour’s target of building 1.5m new homes by 2029.

At Pollard Thomas Edwards, ‘grey belt’ is hotly debated almost every day: inspiring a fresh set of questions, some directly, and some tangentially related to both the CPRE and Brown feelings for ‘empty lots.’ For example, by ditching the ‘beauty’ test for new development, will this give a free pass for the worst kind of newbuild housing – rabbit hutches - on land deemed low in biodiversity but which is actually teeming with wildlife and more easily redeemable as a natural resource than we thought?

And in the tangential corner, what kind of housing and placemaking does grey belt inherently demand? Is such land suburban or urban? And what then should the architectural response be? A Beechwood Village approach, in the manner of our National RIBA award winning estate on the fringes of Basildon?

Or something more like our Lea Bridge Gas Works’ proposal, a 643-home neighbourhood on a former East London gas works site, defined by more homes in towers up to 21 storeys high? Of course there are no easy answers here, and the need to build is real. Examining the fine grain of the grey belt vision, however, feels like the most urgent question of all.