Public enjoyment of the open countryside in England and Wales, 1919-1939: A study of the campaigns for the establishment of national parks and the securing of wider access to the open countryside during the inter-war period.

The subject of this work is the concern for the public enjoyment of the open countryside in England and Wales which grew up between 1919 and 1939. I have attempted to analyse its constituent parts, assess their influence and judge their longer-term significance. Its scope has been limited to the political and social sphere and is primarily an examination of the inter-play between public opinion and various interest groups on the one hand and the process of parliamentary and governmental decision-making on the other. In broad terms the study falls into two parts. One is the campaign for the establishment of National Parks between 1925 and 1939 and the other the campaign for the enactment of the Access to Mountains Bill which can be traced through the whole twenty-year period, and indeed from much earlier. Within the first part attention is concentrated on the work of the Addison Committee on National Parks (1929-1931), subsequent parliamentary and public interest in its recommendations and upon the work of the Standing Committee on National Parks, which was set up in 1935. The Access campaign is first considered in general terms by looking at the development of walking as a popular open-air pastime and the struggle for public access to the moorlands in the Peak District, and then a more detailed scrutiny is made of the events leading up to the passing of the Access to Mountains Act of 1939. As little material has yet been published on this subject the source material used has in large part come from parliamentary papers, official reports, departmental files, comment in newspapers and journals, minutes of meetings and conferences, memoranda, correspondence and from the recollections of some of those people involved who are still alive.