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I bet there's plenty of readers remember the wonderful Ham River pits at South Ockendon....any memories you want to recall?

Oh what a Pandora's box you may well have opened Cliff!
The answer to you question lies in the text you've wrote Why no development? Why no housing?
At a cost of 6 million quid an acre on average to clean up contaminated land. More dependant on what the geo-tech samples throw up, no developer will make money out of developing such sites even if they could.

This site is not unique or uncommon, there are 100s if not 1000s up and down Britain. To the best of my knowledge there has only ever been 3 old landfill sites built on and that was with the vast shed warehousing type buildings.
As for housing, who would want to live and bring up a family above a toxic tip?

The best that can happen to them is that they are covered in top soil and mulch and planted up with trees and rough grass and left alone or managed as country parks as many are.

These sites are the environmental nightmare legacy left to future generations by the present generation throw-a-way society.

Not just that, brownfield sites, i worked for an engineering company and when it moved its operations abroad, the site was cleared for housing, high cost stuff now on site, boreholes were dug to 30 metres, cyanide plus other poisons showed significantly at all levels, but still they built.

Indeed so Wanderer

Perhaps you might do better to send the letter to someone like Panorama or Despatches... those are more likely to make a programme on it?

As a member of Moor Hall & Belhus A.S. I also witnessed those horrendous events. There were also almost daily visits from the Fire Brigade to put out the burning rubbish and old rubber tyres. The area was often clouded in thick black smoke. It was heartbreaking to watch helplessly as a wonderful area of gravel pits became a giant dump. Around 1981 we suffered a complete fish kill due to leachate from the area surrounding the lakes. Action was taken to try to reduce or remove further threats, but it is really another accident waiting to happen.
However, over the last five years or so ruralarisings.co.uk started a 10 year project named 'Little Belhus Country Park'. This has involved tons and tons of material being brought onto the site with new footpaths, a bridleway and a cycleway and the re-profiling of ditch banks for water voles to burrow into. New ponds and ditches are to be created for great crested newts.
Moor Hall still hold the fishing rights and the lakes are to remain as they are.
The Committee are working closely with Rural Arisings as the project continues and it is hoped that at the end the whole of this area will be successfully restored, although of course the threat of further pollution cannot be completely ruled out.

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Anything is possible when money talks

Thanks, Graham; I'd like to see them try that at the Ockendon site! It'd take a hundred years.