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Matthew Kelly on the Women Who Saved the English Countryside

Posted on 12th April 2022 by Anna Orhanen

In his eye-opening volume The Women Who Saved the English CountrysideMatthew Kelly pays tribute to four pioneering female conservationists - Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Pauline Dower and Sylvia Sayer. In this exclusive piece, the author talks about what inspired him to research and write about their tireless efforts in safeguarding England's green spaces - and the public's right to access them.

It is easy to be seduced by idealised images of the English countryside, by its apparently peerless beauty, a timeless harmony of human and non-human nature. But we know this ideal cannot tell the whole truth. Just like everything else, the countryside must also be the product of a history, its character the outcome of innumerable decisions made over innumerable years by innumerable people. In The Women Who Saved the English Countryside, I look at some of this history through the activist careers of four women landscape preservationists. Active between the 1870s and the 1970s, they helped establish the idea that all citizens have the right to access and enjoy green space, and for this reason they believed especially valued landscapes should be preserved from harmful development. As characterised many landscape preservationists of the time, they weren’t particularly ecological in their thinking, but instead tended to view the countryside in terms of its ‘amenity’ value for all citizens. 

Two of the women are very famous, two are much less familiar. Octavia Hill was a public moralist and reformer of quite astonishing range and commitment. Her historical reputation as a prominent Victorian, housing reformer and co-founder of the National Trust is long-established. She was particularly aware of the suburbanising pressures in the south-east of England and was committed to preserving public access to the breezy heights overlooking the Kentish Weald. Beatrix Potter is famous throughout the world, known during her lifetime and since for her Peter Rabbit books and association with the Lake District. She worked closely with the National Trust and became one of its most important benefactors. Pauline Dower was born into a grand but progressive Northumberland family and served for nearly twenty years on the National Parks Commission. In partnership with a host of governmental and non-governmental organisations, she helped establish Britain’s national parks system. By contrast, Sylvia Sayer used her position as chair of the Dartmoor Preservation Association to harry the national park authorities, proving to be a brilliant campaigner who could not be ignored in Whitehall or in the boardroom. All four women helped shape what constituted effective political action in modern Britain.

They could be snobbish and very judgemental about the preferences of others, especially if the places that mattered to them most were threatened by new housing, private commercial developments, and public infrastructure. But they should not be caricatured as reactionary. They were convinced that urbanisation and industrialisation, by alienating humanity from nature, had a terrible effect on human well-being. If public and private developers were the immediate enemy, they were symptomatic of a much greater force, the birth and development of industrial modernity. In response, they advocated forms of environmental citizenship that identified land as public goods from which flow collective rights. By fighting to preserve the natural environment from development and to maintain and enhance right of access, they sought to deliver forms of environmental justice that were quintessentially modern. They believed that the rights of private property should be limited by the needs of the wider community. If landholders did not extend their universe of obligation to the people at large, if the protection and production of vital public goods—health and happiness—could not be delivered through voluntary action, then legal or democratic processes should be brought to bear on the problem. 

To tell their stories takes us from the birth pangs of landscape preservationism in mid-Victorian Britain through to the institutionalisation of nature conservation in the late twentieth century. Through the lives of the four, we can see the historic shift from voluntarist to statist principles. Hill and Potter, investing their hopes in the National Trust, represented the liberal and voluntarist ethos predominant before the 1930s, whereas Dower and Sayer, committed to national park principles, represented the social democratic, statist ethos that gathered strength after 1945. It was not a coincidence that the government which created the National Health Service in 1946 established the National Parks Commission in 1949.

Sayer retired as chair of the Dartmoor Preservation Association in 1972. That now seems a good while ago. And since then, much has changed, including the development of the more ecological orientation of contemporary environmentalism. I look at some of these shifts in the book’s epilogue, charting the development and reception of new ideas like ‘rewilding’ and ‘nature-friendly’ farming, but I also show how ideas Octavia Hill floated in the 1870s about the rights of citizens to access green space remain just as potent today. We saw this during lockdown, when access to gardens, parks, and the countryside came back onto the public agenda with a vengeance. Fierce debates on social media, especially when visitors behaved irresponsibility or selfishly, seemed to confirm the general view that with rights must come responsibilities. These disputes exactly recalled the issues confronted by Hill, Potter, Dower and Sayer. But they were joined by new concerns, particularly a greater awareness of how rights that exist on paper can be difficult to exercise in practice. Are rights-based access claims underpinned by ableist assumptions? Are we sufficiently alert to barriers to entry based on class, race, or gender? These debates reflect contemporary concerns, but they have deep historical roots, which I think an appreciation of these four activist women can help us to see.

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