National Parks: Looking Forward

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One of the twin themes of National Parks Week is ‘Looking after the Future’ – both of our parks and the planet as a whole. Beyond dozens of walks, special activities on offer include solar-powered boat tours on the Broads, hedgerow repair workshops in Northumberland and tours of the ultra-green Pembrokeshire Coast Authority building at St Davids. Seeing such an emphasis on green initiatives is heartening, since our National Parks are almost as valuable as ‘green catalysts’ as they are as actual green spaces. Indeed, while the UK’s fourteen parks cover roughly 9% of England, 20% of Wales and 7% of Scotland, their true size in our collective imagination is much bigger. Together, they attract over 60 million foreign and domestic visitors a year – reminding us all how fortunate we are, and what is at stake in the battles against global warming, pollution and overdevelopment.

As Roly Smith notes in his article to mark National Parks Week, the rise of such areas began in the United States back in the 1800s. And though we’re only now marking the 60th anniversary of the creation of our own parks, a look at the various dates is revealing. 1951 saw the creation of the Peak District, Lake District, Snowdonia and Dartmoor sites, followed by Pembrokeshire Coast and North York Moors the next year. Yorkshire Dales and Exmoor followed in 1954, with Northumberland and Brecon Beacons in place three years later. It took until 1989 for another ‘new’ park to come along – and that’s just because the Norfolk Broads were given equivalent status to a National Park.

Since the year 2000, though, we’ve seen a resurgence in National Park creation, with Loch Lomond & The Trossachs, the Cairngorms and New Forest National Park joining the list. Most recently – to the delight of Ramblers and others who campaigned long and hard – the government finally announced the creation of the South Downs National Park, which is expected to be inaugurated in 2011. This new park will protect 1,627 square kilometres of varied land and habitat stretching 140km from Hampshire to East Sussex, creating a secure future for the area’s wildlife and heritage by merging two existing Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Today, our National Parks (along with other protected areas) are part of a global family of over 113,000 protected areas which cover 6% of the Earth’s surface. So as we enjoy them during this special week, let’s look forward to another 60 years of National Parks and other precious spaces – and look after them more than ever. After all, if the individuals who created them sixty years hadn’t thought of us and our children, the future generations then unborn, we would not be able to walk through them today.

Chris Hatherill is web editor of Walk Magazine.

Click here to read our twin feature, Looking Back

Britain’s network of National Parks (click to visit each site)

Your passport to the great outdoors

To mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of our National Parks, organisers are challenging the British public to visit all 14 of them over the coming year. You can download a special National Parks Passport or collect one from a National Park visitor centre, then start collecting a stamp and signature in each National Park you visit. There are more than 60 million visitors a year to the UK’s National Parks but some are better known than others… the Passport aims to encourage us all to try somewhere new.