Bill Bryson's speech

Something I have often wondered is why you don’t make the whole of England a National Park. In what way, after all, are the Yorkshire Dales superior to the Durham Dales? Why is the New Forest worthy of exalted status but glorious Dorset is not?

It’s preposterous really to say that some parts are better or more important than others. It’s all lovely. And there’s not much of it. Of all the surface area of the Earth, only a tiny fragment – 0.0174069 per cent, or so I gather – can call itself Great Britain. So it’s rare and dangerously finite and every bit of it should be cherished.

The miracle, in my view, is that on the whole it is. For all the pressures on rural England, and all that could be made better, the countryside remains one of this country’s supreme achievements. I know of no landscape anywhere that is more universally appreciated, more visited and walked across and gazed upon, more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of England. The landscape almost everywhere is eminently accessible. People feel a closeness to it, an affinity, that I don’t think they experience elsewhere.

If you suggested to people in Iowa, where I come from, that you spend a day walking across farmland, they would think you were mad. Here walking in the country is the most natural thing in the world – so natural that it is dangerously easy to take it for granted.

Because the countryside is so generally fine and looks so deceptively timeless, it’s easy to think of it as somehow fixed and immutable and safely permanent. In fact, it is none of these things, of course – though it is very ancient, even more ancient than people often realise.

Not far from where I live in East Anglia, there is a hedge called Judith’s Hedge, which looks like any other. But in fact Judith’s Hedge is very venerable indeed. It was planted by a niece of William the Conqueror in the second half of the eleventh century. So it is older than Windsor Castle, Westminster Abbey, York Minster – older than most of the buildings in Great Britain.

Even closer to home for me – indeed just beyond my bedroom window – is a handsome church tower that was built at about the same time. It has been standing there, adding a little touch of nobility and grandeur to the landscape, for 900 years. I find that a literally fantastic statement. If this church were in Iowa, people would travel hundreds of miles to see it. Of course, you’d have a job explaining to them how it got there, but you take my point. It would be a venerated relic. And here it is just an anonymous country church, treasured by a few aging parishioners and one overweight American, and otherwise almost entirely unnoticed because it is just one of 659 ancient parish churches in Norfolk alone.

Altogether there are twenty thousand ancient parish churches in Britain. There are so more listed churches than there are petrol stations. Isn’t that an amazing fact? If you decided to visit one every day, it would take you 54 years to see them all.

Wherever you turn in Britain you are confronted with wondrous and interesting things – 19,000 scheduled ancient monuments, 600,000 recorded archaeological sites, 100,000 miles of public footpaths, 250,000 miles of hedgerows, 73,000 war memorials, 6,500 listed bridges, 14 National Parks, a hundred or so Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, over 4,000 sites of Special Scientific Interest. You can’t move ten feet in this country without bumping up against some striking reminder of a long and productive past.

And it is almost entirely man-made – or human-made, I should perhaps say. That’s really quite interesting. Where I come from, when the landscape is stunning it’s because nature made it that way. In Britain when it’s stunning, it is, more often than not, because people made it that way. Of Britain’s 27 World Heritage sites, only four are natural formations. All the rest are monuments and landscapes built by humans. What makes this country superlative are the things that people have done for it.

All that posterity asks of us is that we look after what has been created for us already. Creating an enchanting landscape is of course only part of the achievement. Keeping it is the real trick.

That is why I am so proud and excited to be part of this heroic organisationla,
and why I am so pleased to be able to thank you, and all the other members who can’t be here today, for your years of devoted effort. It is deeply appreciated, believe me – even I daresay by those who don’t know how much they appreciate it. It is inexpressibly vital that we keep up the fight and happy to pledge now to support you in any way I can.

You hardly need me to tell you how lucky you are to have what you have in this country. Being surrounded by such a sumptuous diversity of history and beauty is a delight and a privilege, of course, but it is also a great danger. When you have such an abundance of great things, it is easy to think of it as essentially inexhaustible and to persuade yourself that it can be nibbled away at without serious loss. I hate it when people think like that.

To me, the mathematics of the British landscape are wonderfully simple and compelling. Britain has about 60 million acres of land and about 60 million people. That’s one acre for each of us. Every time you give up 10 acres of greenfield site to build a superstore, in effect ten people lose their acres. To enjoy the countryside they must go and use other people’s acres. By developing countryside you force more and more people to share less and less space. Trying to limit the growth of development in the countryside isn’t Nimbyism, in my view. It’s common sense.

Of course I am new to all this and have a huge amount to learn. I recently spent an afternoon with a friend of mine who is a farmer trying to understand set-aside policy and I realized then that there aren’t enough years left in my life to grasp some things. But I am determined to try and much of my next year or so will be devoted to meeting with people and learning. I hope that a lot of that will involve meeting with many of you at branch level and learning from you at first hand. I would be also love to hear from you at my email address at CPRE.

I’ve been overwhelmed with messages in recent weeks, and have fallen somewhat behind, but I do promise to get to all messages within the next few weeks and I will always read all messages personally. I would really like to know how I can be of use to you.

But in the meantime there are three matters that I hope and intend to pursue anyway, and I would really value your thoughts or advice on any of these. These aren’t necessarily, by any means, the most important issues facing us today, but they are three that happen to mean a lot to me.

The first is litter and fly-tipping. You are probably aware that this is something of an obsession of mine, and I am finding to my gratification that it is something that many other people feel strongly about too. This is something that I will be pursuing particularly vigorously and I am hoping that I can enlist the support of the branches and regional groups on certain aspects of the campaign that we are presently putting together. We will need help with litter censuses and surveys and that sort of thing. You’ll be hearing much more about this in the weeks to come, but if you have any thoughts for me to be getting on with, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Second, pylons and overhead wires generally. To me, marching ranks of pylons are way too common in the countryside, and inexcusably alien and ugly. Too often when you go into the country you end up feeling as if you have wandered onto a set from War of the Worlds.

In 1986, at the time the electricity companies were being privatized, the Economist magazine calculated that if all the electricity generating companies were required to devote one half of one percent of their turnover to burying overhead cables, we would be able to bury 1000 miles of them every year. There are 8,000 miles of high-voltage power lines in this country, so they would all be buried now.

Instead they seem to be a part of nearly every rural scene, nearly always running along hilltops and ridgelines where they ruin views in both directions. Other countries make electricity companies paint their pylons dark green or otherwise lose them against the background. I don’t understand why National Grid, the company responsible for erecting pylons, is allowed such freedom. We don’t put motorways on the tops of hills. We don’t run natural gas pipelines overhead. Why should power lines be permitted to go wherever it suits the distributing company to put them?

At a minimum there should be a presumption against allowing pylons within sight of World Heritage sites, national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty. But really they should just be taken away. I don’t pretend to understand the economics of electricity distribution, but I do know that Denmark buries 18 percent of its high voltage cables while Britain manages just 6 percent. Surely this is something we could be looking into.

Finally, number three, trees, forests, woodland. You can never have too many trees, in my view. The UK has less forest cover than almost any country in Europe. France has 28 percent, Germany 32 percent, Italy 34, Sweden almost 70 percent. Britain has just 12 percent – the fourth lowest amount in Europe. Even Cyprus has more. What’s more, as the government minister responsible cheerfully conceded in a parliamentary answer of last December 4, there are no specific targets for woodland creation in England. Well, I think there ought to be.

And I think there ought to be a lot more thoughtful and vigorous landscaping of motorways, dual carriageways and other roads. I think we should be pushing forcefully for that.

And while we are talking meaningfully about planting things, I think we should be pushing forcefully for the restoration and renewed planting of hedgerows. I am really worried about hedgerows. They are what defines the English landscape and everywhere they are just quietly fading away. Hedgerows die bit by bit, as here. Eventually you end up with no hedgerows at all – and this is the fate that I fear is awaiting very large swathes of the countryside.

Something really needs to be done. I know there are grants available, but they are dependent on the willingness and commitment of farmers – and farmers are busy people. What is needed is an aggressively pro-active policy by somebody to identify the neediest hedgerows and to really help and encourage landowners to patch and repair them, particularly where they run alongside roads or byways. It has to happen.

News release, 9 July 2007
> 'Make England A National Park', says new CPRE President Bill Bryson