As early as 1810 William Wordsworth said that visitors to the Lake District in northwest England thought of it as "a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy." Since then awareness of the need to protect unspoiled countryside has grown with the progress of industrialization and has become more and more vocal.
In 1949 the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was passed and the National Parks Commission inaugurated. Because of the small size of England and Wales, and the limited amount of unoccupied and relatively wild land, space for the recreation of some 46 million people has to compete with more strictly economic needs such as mineral-working, afforestation and the provision of water-gathering grounds, to say nothing of agriculture itself.
The result is that the British National Parks, as they were proposed and as they have come into being, include villages and even towns around the margins of upland areas and in their valleys. It follows that any national view of a park system must come to terms with the local life of each park. Not only farming but maybe even industry must flourish in a park.
—H. C. Darby, at the 1961 RFF Forum.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1961 issue of Resources magazine.
