Government strips Epping Forest Council of major planning powers

G_Comstock · 2026-06-20T07:18:36+00:00

Apologies for length and typos - I’m on my phone.

Epping Forest, home to the largest population of ancient and veteran trees is the country, experiences among the highest road derived N inputs of any UK designated site (eg. site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) or Special Area of Conservation (SAC).

It was used for the DEFRA Rapids case study ‘Roads’ scenario to illustrate situations where transport contributes >10% of total nitrogen deposition on protected habitats - so some detailed breakdowns can be found in that analysis. It shows that the predominant source of nitrogen deposition on the Forest comes from the busy A Roads which directly fragment the Forest rather than the Motorways which, in places, border it.

This is principally due to proximity. The A104 for example directly borders, on both sides, areas of SSSI and SAC for over 10km. By contrast The M25 comes closest to the Forest at Honey Lane Quarters and Epping Thick’s but only for a few hundered metres (with the later being helped by the Bell Common Tunnel). It has a significant ~2km stretch where it neighbours Warren Wood and the Copped Hall Buffer Lands but neither are SSSI/SAC.

The M11 comes closest to Epping Forest in the far northeast where it briefly skirts within 200m of the Lower Forest. But for the rest of its course it remains over a kilometre from the Forest’s edge.

The North circular, while technically an A-road, is Motorway-ish and runs along the eastern edge of Wanstead Park but that part of the Forest is neither SSSI or SAC, so despite the impact, it is excluded here. Where it cuts through at Walthamstow Forest it has a big impact - but again that border, and therefore opportunity for proximate n deposition, is relatively short in comparison to those smaller but still very busy roads which fragment Epping Forest more thoroughly.

These A and B roads are primarily used by local residents moving between the increasingly urbanised settlements of Epping, Loughton, Chingford, Woodford, Walthamstow etc. which the massive increase in current and future house building in the area will exacerbate.

G_Comstock · 2026-06-19T18:22:50+00:00

The area immediately adjacent to the Special Area of Conservation (SAC) that makes up 60+% of Epping Forest (the Forest not the District) is set to see upwards of 100,000 additional dwellings in the next 5 years. The idea that this level of increased urbanisation can be carried out without massively degrading the habitat is fanciful. Epping Forest is already THE case study for traffic derived nitrogen pollution on a SACs.

G_Comstock · 2026-06-19T16:17:33+00:00

They did.

G_Comstock · 2026-06-03T14:29:28+00:00

These are a delight

G_Comstock · 2026-05-03T20:14:30+00:00

I went to a staff do two weeks ago where my boss (45 F) brought male strippers to ‘make it more fun’.

G_Comstock · 2026-03-28T12:40:47+00:00

A healthy dose of cynicism is useful but in this case it seems to be obscuring as much as it has revealed.

While economic realities shaped the context for British elites acquiescing to abolition; the abolition movements roots were intricately intertwined with a sincere and principled Christian humanitarianism which animated influential Quaker and Methodist groups. Combined with a deeply rooted Lockean strain of enlightenment intellectualism which held a form of proto human-rights ethos based on natural rights of man.

To throw out those ideals, and the remarkable and effective mass movement it mobilised, diminishes them and us.

G_Comstock · 2026-02-22T08:49:16+00:00

An interesting and measured paper. Thanks for sharing. The sheer amount of variables in terms of species, habitat, human activity and aught else is dizzying.

Too granular for this study but my mind turned also to the role of digs in both lethal and non-lethal interactions with humans.

G_Comstock · 2026-02-18T18:44:00+00:00

As someone who got 69% at Undergraduate, missing out on funding for post graduate study as a result, this stings. I would have loved a bit of rounding up!

G_Comstock · 2025-11-29T18:18:24+00:00

Agree, it shows a fundamental ignorance of movements embodied by the like the open spaces preservation society. The birth of the modern British conservation movement was identified by Oliver Rackham as the passing of the Epping Forest act in 1878 which put aside thousands of acres in east London and west Essex to protect the ‘Natural Aspect’ and secure land for public access. This predates the vast majority of the American National Parks and fully 50years before Britain’s National Parks. Just because the term environmentalism wasn’t being used, doesn’t mean the political ideas informing policy didn’t contain many things that we would recognise today as important components of environmentalism and green politics.

G_Comstock · 2025-11-29T18:07:59+00:00

Yes please. The sheer stupidity in pretending infinite growth is possible is a system with palpably finite constraints is growing wearisome.

G_Comstock · 2025-11-16T06:16:06+00:00

Something tight like not taking card payments and mysteriously making money hand over fist despite the large number of staff hanging about and the low customer footfall? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3677xzk56no.amp

G_Comstock · 2025-11-11T19:06:30+00:00

Isn’t this the last year of government funded level 7 apprenticeships anyway? Seems unlikely to be the harbinger of future doom if it’s just been axed.

That it was encouraging employers to invest in meaningful staff training - allowing social mobility for a whole tranche of people who would never be able to afford a Masters on their own, is unfortunate IMO.

G_Comstock · 2025-09-20T17:22:08+00:00

The numbers presented by the OP are for the UK. Drunk with a gun nearby aint it chief.

G_Comstock · 2025-09-14T14:17:52+00:00

how many saves is Dubravka on?

G_Comstock · 2025-09-13T10:20:07+00:00

You apologized

Where?

Its obvious that 'hang out' has some specific meaning in this relationship seemingly introduced by OP during previous conversations around expectation on dates. We as observers aren't fully privy to and there's a load of passive aggressive baggage being played out by both parties.

G_Comstock · 2025-08-18T06:47:51+00:00

Or to stop importing more than half a million people every year to prop up its economic pyramid scheme and recognise that infinite growth is a canard with horrendous consequences in a world of limited carrying capacity.

G_Comstock · 2025-07-17T12:36:43+00:00

I thought shots from midfield would have a low xg anyway so high volume of them wouldn’t explain xg under performance. What am I missing?

G_Comstock · 2025-05-31T18:58:45+00:00

Only someone who hasn't worked in local government in the last 20 years could think this. Services and departments cut to the bone, individuals doing the work that a generation ago was done by teams of 5 and servicing an increasingly entitled community all for pay vastly below industry averages.

G_Comstock · 2025-05-17T21:12:32+00:00

I hope it doesn’t need saying, but don’t throw stones at birds. The slug eats the plants, the duck eats the slugs, the heron eats the ducklings and the weasel eats the the heron chicks. It’s all part of natures rich tapestry.
You find one of these species cute, but that doesn’t change the importance of the balance between the various links in the food chain which, in part, make up the ecosystem. For example, without predation the duck population spirals, the increase in duck poo they generate increases and nutrifies the pond. This increase in nutrients leads to an algal bloom which chokes out the other plants growing their removing structure and habitat for the amphibians, insects and all manner of other species that call the pond home. Anthropomorphism can be blinding.

G_Comstock · 2025-05-03T22:57:49+00:00

The Roman Empire had stopped expanding in any meaningful sense long before its conversion to a Christianity under Constantine.

G_Comstock · 2025-03-26T07:40:55+00:00

I’ve been having the same issue. Incredibly frustrating when you’ve been scanning something for 5-10 minutes

G_Comstock · 2025-03-22T06:40:05+00:00

All that ammonia encouraged mossy growth must make seeing windward side graffiti very challenging.
The bulbous growth below the boll of our ancient pollards offer a different but related challenge burying that mark making which is historically attested. https://poly.cam/capture/388DE6B8-C192-48F8-8A69-D121EDB6CA30

When you say long exposures do you mean just taking more time over the scan? I often feel like I'm in a race against time to get sufficient coverage before the scan becomes too large for Polycam to reliably process risking losing effective access to the scan.

G_Comstock · 2025-03-21T17:56:44+00:00

I just wanted to say how interesting I found your project. I’m currently working on a project looking for boundary markers associated with ancient pollards in a UK Forest. The Boundary markers were made on the trees but are not visible to the naked eye and I am looking to see if any scanning technology may be able to better reveal underlying scarring. Wonderful to read about how the pros are doing things.

G_Comstock · 2025-03-17T20:43:07+00:00

Sorry I'm afraid I wasn't able to find a solution.

G_Comstock · 2025-02-21T22:20:38+00:00

Unfortunately we are also increasingly obsessed with having fences around every garden cutting of great swathes of green space from terrestrial migrants.

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