Overcrowded Britain is bursting at the seams, and the evidence is all around you

Then there’s light and noise pollution. Only in about a tenth of the country can you now enjoy a truly dark sky, says the Campaign to Protect Rural England. And, for many people, escaping noise pollution – not least car and air traffic noise – is almost impossible.

No wonder we see such rage. Road rage, pavement rage, restaurant rage and work rage. We rage when other people invade our space, and since that’s being steadily squeezed, we’re lashing out. Recently I saw two grown men on a commuter train in a violent argument about an arm rest.

In an experiment back in the 1960s, scientist John Calhoun studied the effects of overcrowding on animals, and discovered a range of frightening psychological symptoms, from frenetic overactivity to stress and withdrawal, even cannibalism. Calhoun described all this as “behavioural sinks”.

Do humans, too, suffer when crowded together? Calhoun himself had faith in our ability to adapt. Yet evidence suggests there is a link between overcrowding and adverse effects on human beings. For example, a 2011 study of housing in Los Angeles by Claudia Solari and Robert Mare found that the wellbeing of children suffers when they are exposed to overly crowded conditions, and that these effects are lifelong.

And, here in Britain, a 2004 paper from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (John Prescott at that time) looked at the impact of overcrowding, and found that congested housing in childhood can affect not only their health as children, but as adults too.

Clearly, more research is needed, but we should surely be concerned that British families have some of the smallest homes in western Europe. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average house in England and Wales now equates to less than half the size of a tennis court. In Denmark, it’s almost double that, and in the US close to triple that. Not surprisingly, then, we pay more than twice as much per square foot as our American cousins.

A South African friend of mine, who’s lived in Kent for 15 years, generously tried to put a positive spin on this. It is because Britain is so over-crowded, he said, that so much effort is made to make it work smoothly – from stringent regulations (no mobile phones while driving, for example) to the smart use of technology. In contrast, he said, some less crowded countries can be like the Wild West.

Well, he has a point. Certainly, the private sector has worked hard to cope with the surge of humanity. The queues at Tesco, for example, remain manageable. But it’s our public sector that’s failing to adapt.

The difference can be seen most markedly at airports, where you can swiftly check-in (private sector), but queue interminably to go through security (public sector). Why? Because the private sector keeps on investing as customer numbers rise. There were about 500 Tesco stores in the mid-1990s, rising to 2,500 just fifteen years later. But the public sector lags behind – understandably, perhaps, as the public purse is so stretched.

Research from The King’s Fund, for example, shows that the number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past three decades, while patient numbers have increased significantly.

Yet, the trouble is that the more Tesco stores we get, along with more shopping centres, housing developments, airports, power stations and the roads connecting them all, the more we have to cram people into ever smaller units, or encroach further on our countryside.

Why has Britain allowed itself to get into this bloated state? Why, like the massive Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, who’s persuaded to eat “one more little wafer-thin mint” before exploding, don’t we see what we’re doing?

First, because we’ve become convinced that a growing economy, fuelled by a rapidly increasing population, is all that matters, instead of focusing on our standard of living and quality of life, which are surely more important.

Secondly, overcrowding is associated, in part but not exclusively, with that toxic word “immigration”, and is therefore something politicians are often afraid to address. And yet it must be obvious that you can be concerned about overcrowding while caring not a jot about people’s race, creed or country of origin.

We know our population isn’t going to reduce any time soon. We must therefore resign ourselves to the crowds, while hoping that the growth might be a little less rapid than the forecasts suggest.

Meanwhile, we’ll have to accustom ourselves to sharing ever more of our personal space, and to the sharp sensation of other people’s elbows.