Long Bay fight well worth it: Bellamy

David Bellamy. Photo / Supplied

British environmental campaigner David Bellamy yesterday strolled through Auckland's most popular metropolitan regional park and declared "the fight has been worth it".

Looking at the rural backdrop to Long Bay Regional Park, Professor Bellamy praised the decade of opposition to its sprouting four-storey homes.

"Everyone owns views and there should be laws to stop them being taken away.

"Studies show that if you look out on a green area, you live longer."

Professor Bellamy is patron of the Okura-Long Bay Great Park Society, which heads back to the Environment Court next month to settle details of a three-year case to protect key areas from a developer's housing plans.

"A lot of people had the dream that this could be part of the park and it's very nice they have got a slice of it and it will be under the guardianship of a park," he said.

"When you have the blue-hair-rinse set with time on their hands and knowledge in their hearts, we can keep going until people come to their senses and build things in their place and leave the green lung."

This amused Professor Bellamy's companion, park society stalwart Bernard Stanley, who quipped: "I'm only just past my 85th birthday and I will be around a while yet."

He said the society had raised $400,000 to fight the court case.

The society collected 57,000 signatures calling on the North Shore City Council and Auckland Regional Council to protect the rural peninsula by extending the regional park.

Under pressure, the councils responded by buying some of the neighbouring land.

In 2005, the society prompted 10,000 submissions against a developer's plans to create housing for 7700 people on the hills and beachfront and joined Environment Court actions.

The developer has 178ha, which could provide 2500 building sites, as well as reserves to form a buffer to the park.