‘Save Our Countryside,’ implores the Observer Magazine of 9 December 1984, following up on the paper’s campaign to protect the ‘traditional landscape and wildlife of Britain’. The cover photo is an idyllic rural scene from the Wye Valley and overleaf a stark illustration of what might happen to it – ‘the march of high-tech farming, better roads and growing towns could erode our classic landscapes. Note the loss of trees and hedges to make way for large-scale arable farming… and the domination and bleakness of new road systems.’
Richard North writes: ‘Farmers and foresters, and perhaps even more, governments and their advisers, must bear much of the blame.’ However, he argues that the farming lobby has been weakened and that ‘conservation has come of age’.
There are writers fighting local battles: Susan Hampshire campaigning to stop a new A3 route north of Petersfield; Ted Hughes attempting to clean up the sewage in the river Torridge at Bideford, Devon; Susan Hill hoping to save Ot Moor near Oxford by tying up the authorities in bureaucracy: ‘3,100 people… bought up bits of Alice’s Meadow, bang in the line of the proposed motorway… The Department is going to have a fine old time tracking them down to serve the required compulsory service orders.’
But not all are optimistic. A retired teacher complains about the M25: ‘I fight no longer. All the cottages have new owners, our lovely pub at the lane entrance has been tarted up, the lane has become like Brands Hatch and the old manor house in the lane next to us is a nudist colony with corrugated fencing all around.’
There is nostalgia reading this today, when the threat is on a different scale. It’s like Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy worrying about his house being bulldozed when the Earth is about to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
