We'll always need bigger airfields - but if the number of aircraft that need a lot of runway continues to reduce, do we really need so many?
If a county contains a couple of long runways, and a couple of dozen decent farmstrips, at-least half of them readily available for everybody to use, we're not really badly off are we?
It probably depends on their location versus road connections.
Take the south east, south of London.
You have
Bournemouth
Southampton
Lee on Solent
Goodwood
Shoreham
Biggin
Redhill
Rochester
Headcorn
Lydd
Manston
etc
It sounds a lot but... first to last is a vast driving distance - about 5 hours. Just Lydd (which
is a great GA airfield) to Shoreham, or to more or less anywhere where anybody lives, is 2.5 hours. The other Kent airfields are 1-2hrs from anywhere, due to poor roads. Even Brighton to Biggin is ~ 1hr. Etc.
Some of them are waterlogged right now and unusable. Most have no available hangarage so your IFR plane rots in the open.
I would guess that the average drive to a hard runway airfield is about 1hr. I am quite lucky at 20mins but if that one closed it would be 1hr and that substantially reduces the utility value for intra-UK flights.
It's a lot easier up North, and in Norfolk etc.
In between all this, according to PC Plod I spoke to last year, are
83 private strips and that is just Sussex. Many more in Kent and Hants. But one cannot get an IFR tourer into any of these; I did try some years ago and all were very tight groups; you may as well ask the fishing clubs if you can water-ski on their lake
Bosex if I responded to you I would get another threatening PM from you, and I have no interest in these, thank you.