The battle for our countryside rages on

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,’ forewarned the economist The Revd Thomas Malthus in 1798. His observation did not go down well with either the Communist thinker Karl Marx or with captains of industry. However, we are still here on Earth, albeit struggling for sustainability in a far busier world.

As arguments rage today about the despoliation of the British countryside by development in the name of economic survival, so the 19th-century figures Wordsworth and Ruskin fumed about the spread of mining (now defunct and provider of tourist attractions) and the first railway lines (now deemed ‘heritage’ and treasured). At the time, these brought much-needed employment and connectivity, yet created what opinion-makers perceived as jarring interruptions to uncluttered landscapes.

Formal opposition to unsuitable development came during the middle and end of the Victorian era (with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the National Trust) and then in the depressed aftermaths of the First and Second World Wars. By 1936, a Times leader suggested that the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), by now 10 years old, should be credited with the notion that ‘the beauty of rural England has a commercial value’. This wasn’t a new idea — the 18th-century travel writer William Gilpin realised Britain’s huge tourism potential — but it had been submerged in an atmosphere of postwar deprivation. Many of the CPRE’s initial concerns remain 100 years on, depressingly unsolved or worse: litter, badly constructed housing, industrial ugliness, hideous signage, pollution, contaminated water.

The historian W. G. Hoskins wrote in his seminal The Making of the English Landscape (1954) that ‘since the year 1914… every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning’. Hoskins is quoted in the CPRE’s centenary publication, Future Rural, by Dame Fiona Reynolds, a former leader of the conservation charity and author of The Fight for Beauty. She suggests that the countryside, which needs far more understanding representation and flexible policy making from Westminster, is at a precarious crossroads: it can either become submerged by ‘characterless suburbanisation’ with ‘a few wildlife-rich islands’ or it could be a biodiversity-rich, farmed landscape populated by vibrant communities. The nation has become ‘countryside blind’ amid a governmental desire to build at all cost.

In the same book, Sir Michael Morpurgo, founder of Farms for City Children 50 years ago, contends that the word ‘protection’ implies ‘siege mentality’ when what is needed is ‘for town and country to understand one another better’. This is not to say that campaigners should ever give up on preserving beauty, but that it reflects the dilemma of tempering creditable and uplifting ambition with pragmatism and 21st-century knowledge.

This article first appeared in the April 22 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.