Why national parks are our national pride

Calling all pub quizzers: which was the first national park in the UK to be designated? The answer is the Peak District, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, as do the Lake District, Snowdonia and Dartmoor, which all followed swiftly in 1951.

There are now 15 — the latest being (here’s another quiz question) the South Downs, created on March 31, 2010 — the eventual fulfilment of an idea that was born as far back as 1929 by the newly formed Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). Its founder, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, a celebrated town planner, had written a manifesto suggesting that ‘a bold and wide policy should be pursued towards the creation of a series of national parks for the preservation of “wild country” with universal appeal for civilised man’. Ironically, the areas we now call national parks and revere for their vivid, individual landscapes, were once considered undesirable places to live for their remoteness and the fact that there few ways of making a living on rough, infertile ground.

Indeed, some found the wildness frightening; it took a certain robustness of attitude to cope. The writer Daniel Defoe, who published the first account of his travels across Britain in 1724, found the ‘wonders’ of the Peak District — its caverns, caves and springs — ‘underwhelming’ and described it as ‘the most desolate wild and abandoned country in all England’. About a century later, however, attitudes towards beauty and public access had changed and the poet William Wordsworth suggested that the Lake District was ‘a sort of national property to which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’. The dichotomy is that, unlike the vast, genuinely wild, uninhabited expanses of US parks, ours are living, working places and the more accessible they are to civilisation the less money visitors spend in them.

Some residents believe that enterprise will automatically be stifled and planning thwarted; the CLA once said that people there shouldn’t be ‘condemned to selling tea and scones’. Last year, the proposal for a new national park in Galloway and Ayrshire was scrapped, with unhappy locals citing rising house prices and overcrowding among other typical potential problems; the recent row over wild camping on Dartmoor has highlighted how much clearing up landowners quietly do. Overall, however, national parks have to be ‘a good thing’: their myriad and definitive charms, from Dartmoor’s tors to the marsh harriers swooping over the watery Broads and the pony-grazed glades of the New Forest, lend character to this nation, boost the tourism economy and necessitate protection from crass development. They are, as intended by the campaigners of a century ago, still a source of national pride and joy.

This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.