Policy information sourced from the Bexley Local Plan
SP8: Green infrastructure including designated Green Belt
The Council’s commitments to creating a multifunctional network
- Bexley’s green infrastructure, including open spaces and waterways will be protected, enhanced, restored and promoted as valuable resources to provide a healthy integrated network for the benefit of nature, people and the economy. Future development must support the delivery of a high-quality, well-connected and sustainable network of open spaces. In particular, this will be achieved by:
- protecting Metropolitan Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land from inappropriate development;
- encouraging beneficial use of Metropolitan Green Belt such as opportunities for public access, outdoor sports and recreation, retaining and enhancing landscapes, visual amenity, biodiversity or to improve damaged and derelict land;
- protecting Urban Open Space, only allowing development where the public benefit of the development clearly outweighs any harm;
- resisting harmful development of gardens and other amenity green spaces;
- keeping under review existing Allotments and encouraging provision of space for community gardening, including for food growing, within new developments;
- working in partnership, seeking funding and supporting projects to promote the restoration and enhancement of open spaces, public realm and the waterway network within the borough;
- agreeing proposals for creating or improving habitat, implementing priorities for the recovery of nature outlined in the relevant local nature recovery strategies, borough strategies or studies on open space, green and blue infrastructure, including where appropriate, rivers and waterways restoration;
- supporting the role waterways can play as tools in place making and place shaping, contributing to the creation of sustainable communities;
- protecting land that forms part of the Southeast London Green Chain as an important environmental, recreational and educational resource, including the Green Chain Walk, seeking to improve public access to and through the area, and promoting it as a recreational resource and visual amenity;
- supporting the creation of new cycling and walking routes to connect publicly accessible open spaces to main destination points, such as Town Centres, public transport hubs, community facilities, and other publicly accessible open spaces;
- ensuring all new developments deliver a net increase to green infrastructure;
- seeking opportunities in new development, where appropriate, to provide new open space, play space and/or public realm, either through direct provision of new open space or improvement of existing open space through planning obligations;
- protecting new, or existing, amenity space that has been provided as part of a development, including incidental green spaces that add amenity value;
- protecting and enhancing the biodiversity, heritage and archaeological values of open spaces, including the Thames, Cray and Shuttle rivers and their tributaries within the borough;
- using water spaces for transport, cultural, recreational and leisure activities and other waterrelated uses where appropriate;
- providing opportunities within waterside development for river and waterway restoration and the protection and enhancement of biodiversity;
- protecting green wildlife and ecological corridors, seeking opportunities to increase connectivity between the network of green spaces and habitats to enhance biodiversity and promote accessibility wherever appropriate; and,
- seeking opportunities to support the functions and drivers for green infrastructure, such as using good urban design to reduce air pollution, integrating green infrastructure into development where there are opportunities to mitigate poor air quality on a local scale.
For more information please see the Bexley Local Plan