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Abstract
For many years Kinder Scout was the scene of bitter conflict over public access to moorland. The Mass Trespass from Manchester in 1932 is now credited by every journalist and even by some historians as the turning point in the battle for 'the right to roam' over forbidden lands. In reality, the story is far more complicated than the legend that has grown up around this single afternoon stunt. The Mass Trespassers were totally ignorant of the achievements of the previous generation; they did not continue their demonstrations; and it was the persistence of the long-established rambling associations that eventually achieved success.
... The trespass was for the right to roam on land that was being used exclusively by the wealthy for grouse shooting. The event is widely credited with leading to the later establishment of the UK National Parks, the development of the Pennine Way and many other long-distance footpaths, and securing walkers' rights in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, 2000 (Hey 2011). ...
In this comprehensive Handbook, scholars from across the globe explore the relationships between workers and nature in the context of the environmental crises. They provide an invaluable overview of a fast-growing research field that bridges the social and natural sciences. Chapters provide detailed perspectives of environmental labour studies, environmental struggles of workers, indigenous peoples, farmers and commoners in the Global South and North. The relations within and between organisations that hinder or promote environmental strategies are analysed, including the relations between workers and environmental organisations, NGOs, feminist and community movements.
... In the case of lunch counter sit-ins, state trespass laws were used to enforce policies of racial segregation in public and private cafes and restaurants, and hundreds of students were arrested and convicted under these statutes across the Southern states of the US (Carl, 1961;Johnston, 1965). In the Kinder Scout case, private landowners had since the Victorian era been closing public rights of way across moorland for grouse shooting, with ramblers denied access by various means (gamekeepers, injunctions, by-laws) (Mayfijield, 2010;Hey, 2011). As cheap rail and bus fares in the inter-war period opened up the Pennines to the working-class residents of Manchester and Shefffijield seeking clean air and physical exercise, the British Workers Sports Federation (a subsidiary of the Young Communist League) staged a mass civil disobedience action; the outcry after fijive were arrested and imprisoned for breach of the peace and unlawful assembly is widely considered to have played a signifijicant role in the creation of national parks in the aftermath of World War II, and remains a totemic act in British working-class activism (Hattersley, 2007;Toft, 2012). ...
This book questions the complex relationship between social movements and violence through two contrasted lenses, first through the short-lived radical left wing post '69 revolutionary violence and secondly in the present diffusion of civil disobedience actions, often at the border between non-violence and violence. This book shows how and why violence occurs or does not, and what different meanings it can take. The short-lived extreme left revolutionary groups that grew out of May '68 and the opposition to the Vietnam War (such as the German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army) are without any doubt on the violent side. More ambiguous are the burgeoning contemporary forms of "civil" disobedience, breaking the law with the aim of changing it. In theory, these efforts are associated with nonviolence and self-restraint. In practice, the line is more difficult to trace, as much depends on how political players define and frame political violence and political legitimacy.
... The earliest places now recognised as category V protected areas were established mainly to preserve scenic beauty, influenced by the aesthetics of Romanticism [9] and to provide urban populations with access to the countryside. The physical and political battles to access high moors above the cities of Sheffield and Manchester were an important stimulus for the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act and helped create the UK's first protected landscape, the Peak District National Park, designated in 1951 [10]. Throughout Europe [11] and North America [12] the earliest national parks were promoted primarily on the basis of scenery, access and recreation, rather than wildlife conservation [13]. ...
A growing number of protected areas are defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as protected landscapes and seascapes, or category V protected areas, one of six protected area categories based on management approach. Category V now makes up over half the protected area coverage in Europe, for instance. While the earliest category V areas were designated mainly for their landscape and recreational values, they are increasingly expected also to protect biodiversity. Critics have claimed that they fail to conserve enough biodiversity. The current paper addresses this question by reviewing available evidence for the effectiveness of category V in protecting wild biodiversity by drawing on published information and a set of case studies. Research to date focuses more frequently on changes in vegetation cover than on species, and results are limited and contradictory, suggesting variously that category V protected areas are better than, worse than or the same as more strictly protected categories in terms of conserving biodiversity. This may indicate that differences are not dramatic, or that effectiveness depends on many factors. The need for greater research in this area is highlighted. Research gaps include: (i) comparative studies of conservation success inside and outside category V protected areas; (ii) the contribution that small, strictly protected areas make to the conservation success of surrounding, less strictly protected areas-and vice versa; (iii) the effectiveness of different governance approaches in category V; (iv) a clearer understanding of the impacts of zoning in a protected area; and (v) better understanding of how to implement landscape approaches in and around category V protected areas.
The history of the national parks movement in England and Wales culminated in the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949. Many constituent bodies were, however, dissatisfied with the administrative arrangements in the new National Parks. To explain this inconsistency, this article seeks to understand the national parks movement as a heterogenous network of loosely affiliated civil society organisations. The movement consisted of three separate clusters, each with its own approach to, definitions and expectations of national parks. These clusters emphasised the aspects of planning and rural preservation, scientific interests and nature preservation, and open-air recreation, respectively. They first joined forces in 1929, when the government appointed the first National Park Committee. Different core organisations led the movement at different stages, forming different coalitions and committees, re-defining the character of the national parks movement and its public and political profile in the process. The scientific and nature preservation cluster was the most successful after abandoning the other two clusters after 1945. This article offers a new interpretation of the history of the national parks movement in England and Wales as a highly contentious and internally divergent social movement.
The rights that guarantee public passage across private land are known as Rights of Way. In this paper, we argue that Rights of Way are a literal manifestation of a politics of space. The paper’s purpose is to suggest Rights of Way are central to issues surrounding social and spatial inequality, specifically with regards to public access to urban and rural space. They are a neglected topic in geographical research, despite their relevance to many subbranches including landscape studies, urban natures, GIS and open‐source geospatial research. Rights of Way in England and Wales are currently facing their biggest legal threat to date. On the 1st January 2026, unregistered Rights of Way (RoW) are set to be extinguished. Path Extinguishment threatens 1000s of kilometres of footpath, bridleway, restricted byway and byways open to all traffic. The paper concludes by examining how the aforementioned geographical approaches help reveal the cultural and historical value of two at‐risk footpaths in Coventry, England.
With climate change, many cultural landscapes will be lost or permanently altered. One approach to managing this is through international designation, through UNESCO, and the focus that it provides. National designations such as National Park status also offer a set of strategies for managing and adapting. This paper explores landscape designations in Japan and the UK focusing on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is suggested that the UK’s dualistic governmental structures for landscapes prioritise some attributes over others. This is examined through the recent inscription of the Lake District as a World Heritage Property and counterpointed through looking at the recent Landscape Review also known as the Glover Report. A case study on a Japanese approach to landscape designation is explored to suggest alternative approaches. Both country’s relationship with international designation is discussed. Methodologies and theoretical approaches are examined with the conclusion that landscape change and loss are dealt with in Japan differently and arguably more effectively.
This book provides the first contemporary assessment of area-based conservation and its implications for nature and society. Now covering 15 per cent of the land surface and a growing area of ocean, the creation of protected areas is one of the fastest conscious changes in land management in history. But this has come at a cost, including a backlash from human rights organisations about the social impacts of protected areas. At the same time, a range of new types of area-based conservation has emerged, based on indigenous people's territories, local community lands and a new designation of "other effective area-based conservation measures". This book provides a concise overview of the status and possible futures of area-based conservation. With many people calling for half the earth's land surface to remain in a natural condition, this book taps into the urgent debate about the feasibility of such an aim and the ways in which such land might be managed. It provides a timely contribution by people who have been at the centre of the debate for the last twenty years. Building on the authors' large personal knowledge, the book draws on global case studies where the authors have firsthand experience, including Yosemite National Park (USA), Blue Mountains National Park (Australia), Bwindi National Park (Uganda), Chingaza National Park (Colombia), Ustyart Plateau (Kazakhstan), Snowdonia National Park (Wales) and many more. This book is essential reading for students, academics and practitioners interested in conservation and its impact on society.
Chapter 6 outlines and analyses the key contributions of working-class people to environmentalism through a discussion of the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Martinez-Alier, Environmentalism of the Poor. Edward Elgar, 2003), the environmental justice movement and trade union health and safety campaigns. It challenges a prevailing view of environmentalism as a ‘post-materialist’ struggle (e.g. Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton University Press, 1990) which suggests that poorer people are too preoccupied with meeting their basic needs for food, warmth and security to be able to think about, or be active on, environmental issues. The contribution of the environmental justice movement will also be explored in this chapter, drawing on my previous work on this topic (e.g. Bell, Achieving Environmental Justice. Policy Press, 2014).
This article details the first event Commoners Choir performed: a singing and walking project, Magna Carta, about the rights of lay people to access land for leisure and recreation. Using original songs, the project conceives both singing and walking as political acts of protest and commemoration. Situated within new walking studies, it argues that the choir’s walking is embodied and politically ‘artful and wilful’. Drawing on radical walking collectives and practitioners from British psychogeography such as the Loiterers Resistance Movement, Wrights & Sites and Phil Smith, it explores how Magna Carta affected the choir as they connected, through song with the rural spaces where the choir performed. Using a small-scale sample of interviews with choir members, the piece explores the experience of the Magna Carta project. To capture the subjective and reflexive nature of both the action of the protest and the psychogeographical response to space as an output, the article is written using a deliberately creative mélange of lyrics, histories, happenings, symbols and images to offer a ‘thickness’ of description of Magna Carta as a walking event.
Rivers have historically been spaces of recreation, in addition to work, trade, and sustenance. Today, multiple groups (anglers, canoeists, rowers, swimmers) vie for the recreational use of rivers in Britain. But, this paper argues, legal definitions of rights of use have not kept up with the growth of recreational river use. Focusing on two groups, anglers and canoeists, it explores the emergence of conflict between recreational users of British rivers in the twentieth century, and subsequent campaigns for universal public rights of navigation on inland waterways. As a result of conflict (real and perceived), small-scale organized groups have re-conceptualized river spaces in ways that reflect a modern engagement with, and understanding of, water through recreation. This papers foregrounds recreation as a form of water-use that generates important water-knowledge. Grounded in the Environmental Humanities, it draws on notions of legal geographies, ‘modern’ waters, and hydrocommons to suggest that small-scale conflicts on British rivers are challenging how we use, govern, and conceptualize river water.
The Access to Mountains Act of 1939 has been ridiculed for the most part as a capitulation to landed interests. Closer reconstruction of the circumstances in which such a legislative attempt was made to extend the public recreational-use of uncultivated countryside emphasises the severe limitations of a Private Members’ Bill. Even greater skills were called for in securing sufficient consensus among the various parliamentary lobbies to convince ministers that there was sufficient accord to merit the use of legislative time and resources to expedite enactment. The Act's achievement was to ratchet forward both ramblers’ expectations and a greater preparedness on the part of landed interests to provide the recreational opportunity anticipated by a post-war, largely urban population.