Founded in 1919 to deal with the chronic timber shortage after the First World War, the Forestry Commission has developed from a government department focused on production into a leading environmental organisation that also champions the landscape, encouraging wildlife and public access. The sheer scale of the organisation between and after the wars meant that it built its own roads and bridges, constructed and supported entire villages and planted over two million acres of forest. Published to mark the centenary of the Commission, British Forests examines not only its unique history but also the Commission's role in research, and the promotion of tree planting in both cities and countryside. The book features a selection of the Nations' forests and beautiful botanical illustrations of trees from its pinetum at Bedgebury in Kent.

This book tells the fascinating story of the policies and projects that resulted in doubling the size of British forests over the past eighty years and of the Acts and actors that played a role in this development. By the end of the century the area of forests in the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) had risen to over two and three quarter million hectares and covered eleven per cent of the land area. Three quarters of them consisted of plantations. Few other countries - Ireland and Denmark are two - have achieved a comparable change in the rural landscape in favour of forestry over as short a time. Furthermore, from being in a deplorable state by the end of the First World War, British forests are now well above the European average in terms of productivity (wood yield per hectare). At the same time they are being called upon to meet increasingly heavy social and environmental demands from a dense, largely urbanised society.