I’ve seen it happen near me and if you haven’t seen it happen near you, I’d be surprised. It has been called the “greying” effect and it’s happening in every village, town and city, but it’s especially happening in the city I care about the most.

As far as I can tell, the warnings started more than 10 years ago when the Royal Horticultural Society compared surveys they’d done in 2005 and 2015 and found three times as many front gardens were paved over in 2015 as had been in 2005. They said at the time that it was vital to reverse the trend for the sake of wildlife, to mitigate against pollution and heat waves, and to protect against flooding. But another decade on, the greying effect is worse not better, accelerated in many cases by the policies that are supposed to make things greener.

The most recent survey by the RHS is a case in point. For a report last year on the “state of gardening”, they used satellite imagery and AI to survey cultivated green space across Britain, including the number of trees, ponds and ground cover. In all, they plotted 25.8 million gardens covering 959,800 hectares and found that 42% of domestic garden space is now paved over (55% of front garden space and 36% in back gardens). In other words, we’re nearly at the point where there’s more grey than green.

The most obvious reason we should be worried is that more paving means fewer plants, and fewer plants makes life harder for pollinators, and making life harder for pollinators makes it harder for humans and possibly, in the long term, impossible. The points about pollution, heat waves and flooding are important too: not only........

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