England has a housing crisis. We need to build many more new homes to house our growing population, but house building is controversial, particularly when it involves the loss of countryside. Addressing both sides of this critical debate, Shaun Spiers argues that to drive house building on the scale needed, government must strike a contract with civil society: in return for public support and acceptance of the loss of some countryside, it must guarantee high quality, affordable developments, in the right locations. Simply imposing development, as recent governments of all political persuasions have attempted, will not work. Focusing on house building and conservation politics in England, Spiers uses his considerable experience and extensive research to demonstrate why the current model doesn’t work, and why there needs to be both planning reform and a more active role for the state, including local government.

Through the analysis of surviving archival traces, this book constructs a history of the imagination and memory of the town of Peacehaven. Built as a speculative development atop iconic chalk cliffs on the Sussex Coast and marketed as a garden city by the sea, the estate quickly attracted adverse publicity. Influential voices such as the Bloomsbury group’s Virginia and Leonard Woolf, architect and writer Clough Williams-Ellis and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England soon began to criticise it as a blot on the rolling, pastoral downland. Instead of reading and appraising Peacehaven’s story in a polarized way, this book breaks new ground by critically interpreting visual representations and commissioned photographs of the Estate and re-evaluating propositions from its inception, which aspired to secure improved public health and home ownership in direct response to the negative impact of industrialization and WWI. Focusing on the interwar period and tracing mutating agendas, the book investigates contested marketing and construction narratives through Histoire Croisée methodology and its intercrossings with memory and the imagination. By combining visual and creative research methods with oral history, multi-layered narratives of place come into focus. The study tracks the visual programme of the developer’s in-house magazine, Peacehaven Post, alongside previously underexplored blueprints, photographs, postcards and promotional guidebooks, and considers the garden city narrative as a form of social Utopia. Garden city ideals are once again evoked in debates as a potential solution to the ongoing national housing shortage, giving this research additional urgency as new large-scale redevelopment erases many of the few and fast disappearing original landmarks.

A vibrant history of English landscape preservation over the last 150 years, told through the lives of four remarkable women In Britain today, a mosaic of regulations protects the natural environment and guarantees public access to green spaces. But this was not always so. Over the last 150 years, activists have campaigned tirelessly for the right to roam through the countryside and the vital importance of preserving Britain’s natural beauty. Matthew Kelly traces the history of landscape preservation through the lives of four remarkable women: Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Pauline Dower, and Sylvia Sayer. From the commons of London to the Lake District, Northumberland, and Dartmoor, these women protected the English landscape at a crucial period through a mixture of environmental activism, networking, and sheer determination. They grappled with the challenges that urbanization and industrial modernity posed to human well-being as well as the natural environment. By tirelessly seeking to reconcile the needs of particular places to the broader public interest they helped reimagine the purpose of the English countryside for the democratic age.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) is one of the world's longest running environmental groups, marshalling the conservation movement in England since 1926. This book celebrates the achievements of the CPRE and associated groups in bequeathing to the present generation a countryside that is still a repository of beauty and tranquillity, despite 300 years of sustained development and population growth. 22 Ideas That Saved the English Countryside re-asserts the vision and durability of the CPRE's key arguments and those of historic partners including The National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Ramblers' Association. public. This book contains contributions from leading thinkers, campaigners and high-profile supporters, including Julia Bradbury, Tony Robinson, John le Carre, Andrew Motion and Simon Jenkins, as well as archive images and beautiful colour photography of present day landscapes, which show what has been saved, what has been protected for ever, and, on occasion, what has been lost - often the most poignant images of all. The ideas include: Controlling Ribbon Development One of CPRE's earliest campaigns was to curtail urban sprawl alongside arterial roads. Through the coordination of public and political support, the Restriction of Ribbon Development Act of 1935 protected views of the countryside from the encroachments of suburbia. National Parks Wordsworth's 1810 description of the Lakes as a 'sort of national property' culminated in CPRE's long campaign for National Parks, which in turn was inspired by the world's first National Parks like Yellowstone in 1874. The Green and Pleasant Land According to historian David Cannadine, 'the English countryside was . . . the very embodiment of decency, Englishness, national character and national identity'. This theme has been expressed by authors from Shakespeare and Spencer through to Kenneth Grahame and George Orwell. As more of us live in cities, the English obsession with escaping to the countryside has grown. Urban Regeneration Every home built on a previously developed 'brownfield' site saves a piece of green field. The efficient renovation of derelict buildings and and land offer a new opportunity to create new urban housing to be set against unspoiled countryside. The creation of new public spaces and pedestrianised zones since the 1960s have made cities more pleasant places to live.

This book is a history of outdoor advertising control in Britain between the early-nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1960s. It considers the development of primarily legislative and governmental approaches to controlling commercial signage, billboards, posters and hoardings in rural and urban areas. This study of how the proliferation of outdoor advertising was dramatically curtailed serves as a means to examine how the understanding and governance of lived spaces developed over a century and a half. In the early-nineteenth century outdoor adverting was just another material nuisance to regimes of improvement; by the turn of the century it was reframed as a threat to architecture, rural beauty and codes of moral self-governance. In the twentieth century it disrupted visual amenity and destabilized the civilizing influence of modern planning. More than merely a history of a radical and largely overlooked change in the visual environment, this is the story of how the modern state saw and regulated the lived spaces of Britain.

'Jake Fiennes is changing the face of farming in Britain... a revolutionising force' Isabella Tree Our relationship with our land is broken: we must heal it. Jake Fiennes is on a mission to change the face of the English countryside. As Conservation Manager at Holkham in Norfolk, one of the country's largest historic country estates, his radical habitat restoration and agricultural work has nurtured its species and risen its crop yields - bringing back wetlands, hedgerows, birds and butterflies over 25,000 acres of land. But this isn't rewilding - there is no 'wild' in Britain anymore. Mass farming, crop science and industrial chemicals have destroyed the majority of our natural landscape and wildlife over the last century. Land Healer is the story of Fiennes's ambition to bring back our flora and fauna - by reclaiming our traditions and trialling new experiments which could restore our symbiosis with our land, and save our shared future. Following the farming year and the natural cycle of the seasons, Land Healer chronicles a life of conservation lived at the edges, and is a manifesto for rethinking our relationship with the natural world before it's too late.

The last twenty-five years have seen an explosion of scholarly studies on lollardy, the late medieval religious phenomenon that has often been credited with inspiring the English Reformation. In A Companion to Lollardy, Patrick Hornbeck sums up what we know about lollardy and what have been its fortunes in the hands of its most recent chroniclers. This volume describes trends in the study of lollardy and explores the many individuals, practices, texts, and beliefs that have been called lollard. Joined by Mishtooni Bose and Fiona Somerset, Hornbeck assesses how scholars and polemicists, literary critics and ecclesiastics have defined lollardy and evaluated its significance, showing how lollardy has served as a window on religion, culture, and society in late medieval England.