Transcript of Dame Fiona Reynoldss words, as Guest Speaker at - - PDF document

1 Transcript of Dame Fiona Reynolds’s words, as Guest Speaker at National Trust of Guernsey’s AGM, held on Wednesday 26th September 2018, at Les Caches Farm, Guernsey. Thank you to the National Trust of Guernsey, for welcoming Bob and I here. We have had a marvellous time getting to know an island that we've never visited before and have fallen, frankly, flat in love with Guernsey so thank you for that. I’ve also fallen in love with not just the physical appearance, but the spirit of Guernsey and I read something by Victor Hugo who, as you know better than me, was a famous resident of the island and he said – ‘the work of the sea which has brought destruction, has been supplanted by the work of Man, which has created a people’ – and I really love that idea, because I'm passionate about cultural landscapes, about man-made, man-created landscapes, but Victor Hugo is adding in that idea, it's not just the physical appearance but the people that make a place and, certainly, this is a place with immense character and immense spiritual succour. I've learnt a lot in a day and a day and a half and we can't stay longer, but I think what I wanted to talk to you about tonight, is something which I hope will be relevant, inspiring and possibly even something which will encourage us in our darkest hours. I want to talk actually, about beauty. When I left the National Trust everyone was very surprised indeed, and I left to work as Master of Emmanuel College, which is an incredibly beautiful college. In fact, I sometimes say that it's a bit like being a property manager in the National Trust – beautiful buildings, beautiful gardens, people with interesting ideas not always agreeing with each other and all

• f the rest of it, but I also did become Chair of the International National Trust
• Organisation. It’s a body of National Trusts from all over the world and an inspiring and a

kind of the collective vision which is really incredible and, which I must say, has certainly inspired me for many years. But I think the thing that holds us all together, is the idea of beauty – this is the theme of my book – and the thing that intrigues me about beauty is that it's a word that we all use all the time, don't we? ‘We went somewhere beautiful, or we saw something beautiful’ – we feel very comfortable with the word, whether we are we talking about the beauty of landscape

• r whether we're talking about the beauty of wildlife, or whether frankly, we are talking

about the importance of our cultural heritage. We all feel very, very comfortable with the word but, do you know what? At least in the UK, this is not a word that you ever hear politicians using, because politicians are entranced by something different. They are entranced by the economy and they tell us, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – wasn't that Clinton’s great word, when he came into power?

2 It's almost as if politicians are embarrassed to use the word beauty, as though somehow, revealing an emotional side is not the right thing to do. And, instead of using a word like beauty in fact, we have invented a whole load of management-speak words to substitute for

• it. Words like biodiversity or ecosystem services – horrible words which don’t really mean

anything and certainly don’t inspire us. And so, we’ve sort of lost that idea in public life, of talking about beauty. But it wasn't always like this because if you think about our past or the past, whether it's through poets or writers, or music or early architecture, beauty was absolutely stitched in to

• ur very being as a culture. It was Chaucer who wrote that it was ‘the beauty of an April

spring that longen folk to go on pilgrimages’. I love that idea people longing to go on pilgrimages. The early churches, of which you have many here, could have been built in an entirely utilitarian way, but they weren't. They were built beautifully with craftsmanship and with love and indeed, the Saxon church near us in Gloucestershire and Ely Cathedral near Cambridge, was something done reverently but also beautifully, and beauty was absolutely integral to the vision of those incredible buildings. But, it's perhaps the romantic poets which best summed up the core values of beauty for us as a nation. Above all, it was the poet Wordsworth who wrote in words that I think all of us will know – those lines written above Tintern Abbey – ‘to recognise in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts. The nurse, the guide, the guardian

• f my heart and soul.’

This wasn't just beauty as an aesthetic element, this was beauty as a deeply moral sense that shaped all of our lives and all of our thinking. Indeed, it was Wordsworth writing about the Lake District – this is the Lake District painted by John Glover almost contemporaneously when Wordsworth was writing about it – this is Thirlmere, before it was drowned as a reservoir – and he talked even then, and then in his Guide to the Lake District in 1810, about the things that were beginning to creep into the Lake District that were threatening its

• beauty. He talked about the ugly villas colonising the valleys, about the extraction of ore

from the mountainside and he talked about the spiky Larch, he hated the Larch instead of these wonderful deciduous woodlands and so, it was he above all, who hated the thought of the arrival of the railway and who wrote those words that any conservationist knows – ‘is there no nook of English soil that is safe from rash assault’. And so, it was Wordsworth who took this idea of beauty as being central to people's lives and thinking of it not only as something we admired, but needed to protect the shift from admiration to defence.

3 But if there was a rash assault taking place in the Lake District perhaps the real rash assault was that which was taking place in our towns and cities and – this famous cartoon by Cruickshank in the 1820s – shows London going out of town and look how you can see the bricks pouring out of the kiln and landing on the poor hayricks running for their lives. You can see the automatons marching on the countryside, destroying everything in their path; and you can see these houses which are decaying even as they are built. This wasn’t something that was made up. This was something to fear, both of the pace and scale of urbanisation and the filth and degradation of urbanisation. In Sheffield alone, in five years in the early 1830s, one hundred and fifty six new streets were built. This was development at a pace that no one had ever seen before, but also houses decaying as they are built. This was the reality for many urban residents living in horrific circumstances in housing that had no water or no clean air; horrible problems of typhoid and cholera; living life with no sense or access to beauty at all. There were huge public concerns about these social conditions that rapid urbanisation brought about, a cacophony of public reports and public debate, and out of that cacophony came a voice explicitly for beauty and that voice was lead by this man – John Ruskin – who was both a great art critic, architectural expert, a philosopher, an extraordinary man who as a child, had a Cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky, because he feared as he grew up that the sky would no longer be blue because of the incredible pollution that was being pumped into the air. He travelled widely, wrote as many of you know about Venice, about architecture but also had what can only be described as an epiphanous experience in the Chamonix Valley where he saw a great storm break over the Alps and he said, in words very similar to Wordsworth, ‘this is beauty, the meeting of nature, of man and of a sense of destiny and commitment to the future’. He wrote and spoke on public platforms, gathered hundreds of people following him and inspiring him. It was he, who set up and inspired William Morris and his movement for Arts and Crafts and indeed, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings which inspired so much conservation architecture. He also inspired this young woman, who really has been my heroine throughout my working life – Octavia Hill – who was an extraordinary young woman when she met Ruskin as a

• teenager. She worked in The Ragged Schools and she used to march the children out on a

Sunday, because they needed to get out into the countryside, to feel green grass under their feet, to smell fresh air and to pick flowers, because they had none of that in their lives and, she believed that everybody was entitled to and needed beauty. She was a pioneer in the social housing movement, buying houses and letting them to families, but always making sure that there was either a garden for the children to play or perhaps even a window box, if nothing else could be provided.

4 She had this vision about green spaces in cities, what she called ‘open-air sitting rooms for the poor’ and she worked with others because there was this incredible development taking place in London and between them, this trio – there's Octavia in the middle, much older by now – Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley on the left, the Lake District cleric who really took on the mantle of defender of the lakes from Wordsworth, and Robert Hunter the lawyer on the right, who was the lawyer for the Commons Preservation Society. Between them they were campaigning for the protection of countryside and the protection particularly, of green spaces in and around towns and, because they failed so often in their efforts, they set up the National Trust, the organisation famous throughout the world, for having as its core, a passion for beauty and a belief in beauty for everyone. Now, everyone thinks of the National Trust as looking back and protecting the past but actually, these three really were thinking of an organisation that would protect the future and I think they left an extraordinary legacy, rather different now from this great land-owning National Trust in England Wales and Northern Ireland at least, but not unlike Guernsey’s own foundation, which was formed around the need for planning and protection

• f the whole Island.

One of the legacies they left which they are not particularly known for, is the very first bit of planning legislation in the UK, the Planning Bill of 1919, which has at its aim, ‘the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified and the suburbs salubrious.’ Those are amazing words. Imagine our planning system aiming for that today, it just doesn't bear thinking about; it’s become so utilitarian and negative. But this was a positive vision, about the importance of planning for beauty and everyone's lives and, as you can imagine from the government picking up their Planning Bill and implementing it, they kind of wanted to but they weren't able to deliver it because, as you know very well, the breaking out of the First World War threw the country into chaos. A chaos from which not only the war, but the aftermath, left the country in a terrible state of economic degradation, social degradation and really very difficult environment. And if the government forgot beauty, so people did not, and there are poignant stories of young men going to their deaths in the trenches, clutching in the breast pocket of their uniforms, a copy of A.E. Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’, because they knew what they were fighting for. They were fighting for the beauty of England and that was one of the rallying cries for our troops going to horrible deaths in Northern France. Stories like Edward Thomas, who didn't sign up until very very late in the war, but when he finally did and someone said ‘Why, why are you going to join the troops?’ and he stood and he picked up a clod of earth and said ‘I'm going to fight for this.’ Very, very moving and then as we all know, he died in the closing stages of the war.

5 And so the government made big promises – a land for heroes, homes for heroes – but of course, as we all know, it didn't materialize. The troops came home to economic chaos, to a government that was unable to deliver on their promises, a pretty shattered society in a shattered economy and, as we all know – into a vacuum, there are always people ready to walk. The government couldn't deliver all those homes, so who did? Well, as speculative developers walked into that gap, and they were not interested in beauty at all, in fact they weren’t interested in good planning or good anything at all and this is a typical example – along all of the trunk roads, leaving all of the major cities of England, march the speculative developers buying up land for cheap, putting up shoddy housing– and in a sense, just doing whatever they could to make some money. And that simulated a new fight for beauty and that was because there was a kind of united public response to this horrible new phenomenon of urban sprawl and perhaps some of the leading components, needing proponents for the fight for beauty, people like – Patrick Abercrombie who was a very early planner from Liverpool who was instrumental in setting up this CPRE and perhaps also – this wonderful instrumental book by Clough Williams-Ellis – an architect some of you may know who designed Portmeirion in North Wales. This is ‘England and The Octopus’ and the

• ctopus was, with its long tentacles, strangling rural England and getting rid of all the beauty

if you like, of the countryside in its way. People were pretty horrified by the rate and pace of sprawl. G.N. Trevelyan who was a great National Trust supporter and Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, wrote a pamphlet, a rhetorical one of course, saying ‘must England’s beauty perish’ and it's full of purple prose about just how terrible modern life was in 1926, so this kind of sense that all was lost was really, really prevalent in public life. Indeed JB Priestley writing in the thirties said – ‘you know the Industrial Revolution was as nothing, because it only affected a few places as this modern phenomenon of sprawl’ – and again great pressure on the government to do something about it, but again the efforts were interrupted by war. But what was really interesting, was that exactly the same arguments were used to inspire the troops as during the First World War. These famous wartime posters – ‘Your Britain, fight for it now’ – showing idyllic pictures of a rural England unaffected by sprawl, it has to be said, but this idea of a romantic England for which everyone was fighting, was used to recruit people into a war that really nobody wanted and certainly, the memories of the First World War were very heavy on everyone's mind. Partly because of that it was very, very clear that this time, things would be different. ‘Never again’ – said Churchill, who lead the political consensus during the war – ‘will people return

6 to broken promises and to a shattered economy. Never again will we let our people down’ – and so he commissioned the Post-War Reconstruction Committee even as the war began and that reconstruction committee was cross-party, commissioned reports from a whole raft of academics and others, on every aspect of society – Beveridge you’ll remember on the Health Service and Welfare Service, reports on education, reports of rural life by Scott, on economic future by Barlow and on a new planning regime by Uthwatt and those reports, all had – very interesting – at their heart, the idea of the good use of land. Sprawl and this terrible waste of land was seen as a universal failure of government policy and, everything needed to revolve around good and wise use of land. I think what's really, really interesting is how that idea was stitched in, to all of those reports but of course, Churchill didn't win the election after the war, Attlee did and so here, I always put this in to show – the Attlee Cabinet of 1945 – because I want you to count the number

• f women in that picture; there is one, Ellen Wilkinson on the far right, who was the

Minister of Education, but anyway it’s not just about the women, this is the Cabinet. The point I'm making, is it wasn't just a Labour government that had these ideas that was built

• n that wartime consensus and all the preparation that had been done. The thing that really

impresses me, is how beauty was stitched in, to their ideas. They were very explicit about meeting both the material needs of the nation, the need for housing, the need for jobs, the need for good economy but also the non-material needs of the nation and that is something I think in terms of the fight for beauty is a very remarkable moment. As well as legislation giving the universal right to education, the Health Service and the Welfare Service for the first time, for housing and for jobs, there was legislation for National Parks and the beauty of the countryside, the first time in our country we had ever had this. This is the Peak District which was the first National Park and there was also, within that, legislation for access to the countryside. This is a photograph that I love because this is Tom Stephenson, at the front of the Ramblers Association, leading six members of Parliament, three of them members of the Cabinet, on a five-day walk in the North Pennines along what was to be the Pennine Way. Now, I would love to take six members of Parliament, three of them members of the Cabinet, on a five-day walk in the North Pennines, but would they come? Not on your life, they would be far too busy and this is to make the point as John Silken said, introducing the Bill – ‘the enjoyment of our leisure in the open air and the ability to leave our towns and walk on the moors and in the dales without fear of interruption, are just as much a part of positive health and well-being, as is the building of hospitals and insurance against sickness.’ So they got it, that people needed these opportunities for release – the spiritual connection with beauty – just as important as hospitals and other developments and I think this is a really crucial recognition.

7 What else did this legislation do? Well, nature reserves for the first time – this is Beinn Eighe

• ne of the very first in the country in Scotland – and indeed the planning legislation, so

vitally important the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, after all those failures before – for the first time managing planning in town and country both to contain sprawl and manage the protection of the countryside, together both determining where development should go but also where it shouldn't. And among this, a bit later, were the green belts – this is a poor picture I’m afraid, of Sheffield’s green belt – but that was the vital protection against sprawl and done really, really vitally, and well. Now of course, they did need housing and so the new towns were the way of meeting people's need for housing and – this is a very early picture of Stevenage – of course it doesn't look at all like that today, but I put it in partly to show you that there was an intention, in a sense a rather Octavia Hill-like intention, to build green spaces and trees and parks and gardens into people's lives. So, all the time, this post-war Government were trying to provide both for people's material needs for housing, but also their non-material needs for green space and beauty and access to the countryside. And what was fascinating about this whole process, was that they were looking for harmony, for balance, for matching a pressure for development and progress with looking after beautiful things. It was also true that in the post-war period, there was for the first time, proper protection for historic monuments – this is Whitby Abbey – but extending from there not only to the individual monuments, but to conservation areas, so looking at villages or parts of cities as an integrated whole and indeed ultimately, in the protection of our cities. This of course is Bath – which became our first World Heritage Site, so a really strong emphasis as we had heard before the war, on land, good use of land, protection of beauty as well as meeting peoples’ needs. This is a very remarkable period. I have to say it's been pretty much downhill since then. And so what I’m going to talk just very briefly about, is some of the fights I've been involved with in my time as a campaigner, ever since I left University, went to the first little charity that I worked for was the Council for National Parks, as you heard, then CPRE and then the National Trust. The first one actually, is about farming because perhaps this is the thing that the post-war government didn't anticipate, because in the 50s, – this is a very romantic picture – farming was seen as an entirely positive force that looked after the countryside, beautiful buildings, here’s a farm we’re in now (Les Caches Farm). But of course very soon after that, there was the big investment in improving the productivity and the efficiency of farming and so, particularly in mainland UK, we saw dramatic changes in the landscape – as this slide illustrates – the complete removal of landscape features like hedges and trees, wall-to-wall

8 cereals, very intensive farming – and indeed, we saw dramatic changes in both the landscape and in wildlife and the stories as you will have heard, of losing a quarter of our heather moorland – this is Exmoor where my first big fight was – over the ploughing up of the Exmoor National Park, driven by public subsidy, farmers simply following economic signals and the loss of the heather moorland which had given rise to the designation of that National Park. A quarter of the heather Moorland in England disappeared between the late 40s and the late 70s. Ninety percent of our hay meadows in England disappeared in the similar years 1945-1984, huge loss of hedgerows and boundaries and indeed, a real sense of catastrophic loss of wildlife which we’re grappling with as a nation today. And yet, farming should be and can be this perfect harmony between beauty and productive farming – this is a little village in Somerset where there is productive farming going on – and yet, it creates a beautiful landscape and as we are redesigning our Farm Policies in the run-up to Brexit, whatever you think of Brexit, we have at least a chance to get it right and we must get it right. It should be through farming, that we look after both the wildlife and landscape of our nation. There were fights about trees too. You might think trees are always good but, you know what, when they're plastered over the Lake District – and this goes back to the 1920s – never mind words ‘the spiky Larch’, the Forestry Commission was born and decided to plant Sitka spruce in Ennerdale – that was a battle royale and it was CPRE actually, which in the 1930s managed to persuade the Forestry Commission not to plant the central Lake District which is, if you like, the hallowed ground for conservation. But still forestry planting was going on in a very unsympathetic way when I arrived at CNP in 1980 and, my first battle was this kind of afforestation just plonked in the middle – this is the Brecon Beacons – no attempt to introduce any softening of the edges or versatility in planting and that was very much still going on, again driven by public subsidy and a lack of concern for the kind of aesthetic or wildlife or other benefits, that you can achieve through good planting in the right place. Massive losses as many of you will know, of our ancient woodlands, particularly in England and – this is the beech plantations of the Chilterns – which were decimated again, driven by public subsidy, to either destroy the trees and farm the land or often under-plant with conifers, so that the biodiversity values disappeared. But also, perhaps the worst example of a government focused only on economic benefit and not on beauty at all, was only back in 2010 when much to everyone's surprise, the government decided that it was going to sell off the public forests. Now, we’d heard

9 rumours about them selling the big commercial conifer forests but this was actually a plan to sell off all of the forests, including the New Forest there's also the Forest of Dean, there are Cannock Chase and many many ancient forests which were all going to be sold. This was an absolutely extraordinary situation where the government seemed to have completely lost the plot about how people felt about these ancient woodlands. But, this was also one of the campaigns which I have to say, I've never seen one run faster. I remember in the House of Commons one afternoon, when the then leader of the opposition Ed Miliband – remember him? – stood up and asked the Prime Minister of the time David Cameron – remember him? – does he support his Right Honourable friend in her plans, Caroline Spelman, to sell off the public forests. David Cameron looked at his notes and said ‘No, I don’t’ and sat down and that was that. End of campaign. Quite extraordinary, never seen any U-turn so fast, but I wish they could all be won that way, it’s rather rare. There were big fights about roads and the coastline and, before I get to roads, the coastline was another big campaign and here – this is the kind of development that was taking place all through the English and Welsh coasts before planning control came in, in the 30s; so caravan sites and bungalows, without any control at all – and this time again it was the Voluntary Sector, first CPRE and then the National Trust with its amazing and prescient Enterprise Neptune Campaign back in the 1960s, which surveyed the whole coastline, identified 900 miles that was beautiful and should be saved and set about buying it. And by the time I left the National Trust, we’d got to around 800 miles, so well on the way. But again, a fight for beauty won entirely this time, through action of the Voluntary Sector. So back to roads which are almost universally, a thing that is not about beauty and is the sheer destruction of major road construction. But this is a time when the government particularly back in the 80s was absolutely determined to build more roads. Traffic congestion was a problem and the answer was to build more roads, but you know what? They all filled up straight away and so it was a self-perpetuating problem, but perhaps the worst clash over road building came, when the government built this road – which is the M3 close to Winchester through St Catherine's Hill – which is one of the most iconic and important spiritual places in the country. It’s an ancient site, full of mystical stories and the government just put a motorway right through the middle, despite huge protests. Anyone ever heard of Swampy who took to the trees and tried to stop this? In a way, this was perhaps the most iconic and most bitter fight and after that, the government did pull back

• n its road building programme. Cynics would say it did so, because it was running out of

money, but this idea of the sort of rampant road-building, did slow down for a while. But actually there’s still a problem with new infrastructure and we all love trains and trains are very good for the environment, but the current proposals for HS2 which is the new fast rail link, just seem to have been put down as a line on a map and only afterwards has the question been asked ‘what's the environmental impact’. This is HS1, running through Kent –

10 the Channel Tunnel rail link – and I was involved with that back in the 80s, when the leader

• f Kent County Council, who was a remarkable man and passionate about the beauty of

Kent, stood up and said ‘OK, I can see we are going to have a railway but I'm darned if I'm going to let this railway just go through Kent on a straight line, without any concern for the people or the countryside through which it's going’ – and he made the company have public meetings every inch along the line and debate the whole route until they found the least damaging one through Kent. And although people may have views about the Channel Tunnel rail link, you very rarely hear people say that that wasn't the right thing to do, whereas HS2 has had none of that proactive public consultation. It's just, as I say, a line on a map with people fighting desperately to protect their bit of countryside that's going to be

• affected. So we could have set out, couldn’t we, with HS2 to build a beautiful railway and

yet they didn't and it just ends of alienating people. Of course we're going to have a railway, we need railways, but why don't we go about it in a different way? And so, those debates have occurred in every sector of policy. Here’s another example, the loss of the country house – The Great Exhibition in the V&A of the 1970s, the crisis of Mentmore, this extraordinary 19th Century house which the government refused to allow the V&A to take on – and there was a great sale, so this house still remains with all its contents gone and so, throughout the post-war period, we’ve repeat examples of governments just focusing more and more on the economy and less and less on that idea about balance and harmony and trying to bring beauty into decision-making. Perhaps the place where that’s been most obvious, has been in the planning system and I keep coming back to planning; it’s always an issue where you’ve got a small area of countryside or small islands, perhaps I could be talking about Guernsey here, and a large and growing population and planning just always seems to be at the heart of those debates. In some ways, it's not hard to see why planning can get a bad name because, of course, we didn't always get it right. Back in the post-war period where, after the devastation caused by bombing of our inner cities, planning allowed some pretty horrible reconstruction to take place and people were quite cynical about planning and yet, planning is the tool which can allow us to both decide where development should go, for good reasons, but also where it shouldn't go, in order to protect the beauty of the countryside and indeed, the beauty of

• ur towns and cities.

And also, perhaps again, having throughout my career had fights with the government over their wanting to weaken the green belt, or wanting to relax control over where new housing should go, or simply impose vast numbers of new houses on beautiful bits of countryside, the biggest campaign was the one we had in my last year at the National Trust, when the government again published this awful document, the National Planning Policy Framework, which had among its words, the statement that, the default answer to every new planning

11 application should be yes, which was an absolute red rag to a bull to the environmental movement because of course, many planning applications will go through, but the idea that the default answer should be yes and you wouldn't have a legitimate debate about whether it was the right thing to do, seemed to us, absolutely shocking. So there was a big campaign and unusually, the National Trust was the one that led the

• charge. It felt as if we were walking in Octavia's footsteps. It felt that this was a moment

when, as an organisation, we had to rise up and be counted and say what we all felt and so, we had this petition in our properties. Can you imagine people coming to our properties to sign a petition? They came in their hundreds of thousands, because it felt a campaign that touched everybody and – here's the petition being delivered into parliament – and in fact, we made considerable progress in a campaign that I kind of like to say we won, but we didn't really win, because our successors are still grappling with a less awful, but still not perfect, planning framework. But the government did back off from that very, very provocative comment and did say, yes, we do recognise that the Planning System is both about new development happening but also about new development not happening in places where it shouldn't. Perhaps the other reason why planning is so important – it's not just about these big fights – is that it’s about using planning to get things right, so in rural areas for example – this is near me in Gloucestershire at home – you can build beautifully in local areas, using vernacular materials and traditional styles and indeed, – this is a very new development in Cambridge – very dense urban development, built to very high standards of sustainability, very successfully accommodating a lot of people, very close to the heart of Cambridge. So again, using planning to get things right, is vital. Perhaps most of all though, I think, is this idea that Planning can enable the right kind of vision, not just in the countryside but also in our towns and cities and so, remodelling our cities and making them beautiful for the future. Sustainable, liveable, walkable is absolutely essential for the millions of people who will always live in cities. This is Newcastle, a city I know well – which has had an enormous amount of money spent on regeneration. It is beautiful, is grappling with sustainability and very successfully so. On another scale entirely, here’s another town where Bob and I live at home, which is Cirencester, which has just had its centre completely remodelled as sustainable, walkable, human-scale and very, very successfully. And here of course, just to flatter you all, is Les Caches Farm, which itself, is not just as a beautiful historic building restored, but a place which will be full of life which will create an income for the National Trust and will be a hub of activity of a totally sustainable kind.

12 So this is a vision, planning is about enabling the right kind of development, development that ticks all the boxes going back to that post-war vision of harmony, of integration, of multi-purpose objectives. I’ve talked a lot about fights haven’t I, and a lot about campaigns and I’ve kind of almost implied that it's all about arguing with the government. Well it's not all about arguing with the government is it. It's also all about us and perhaps the final message – and it’s a message that’s very much in my book – it's really about the way we think about things and the way we behave and act, because there is this kind of obsession within government about the economy, about GDP and that shopping is the only measure that seems to judge whether the economy is going well and yet you know, GDP is a terrible way to measure

• progress. It's only about income and expenditure. GDP doesn't have a balance sheet and we

all know that in life, as in everything, you need a balance sheet. You need to know what your roots are. In wildlife, we’ve kind of wrecked our balance sheet and indeed we're not good at looking after the natural resources on which we all depend. And so, it’s quite interesting to think, well, is there a way through that debate, and I was very struck that an economist, back in the 1940s – an American economist – who captured it very, very well to me, said – ‘Economism, this word that's really about just focusing on the economy, can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It cannot build one which is lovely, which has savour and depth and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction, that loveliness wields.’ – . This idea that actually, it's about us and what we value and how we indicate what we value to the decision makers, really matters. We’ve got some choices here because actually, we can imply that in focus groups and everything else, yes it's all about the economy or, we can recognise that actually we need richness and the things that money can't buy, in our lives. Perhaps the people who need that more than ever, are our children because, remember Octavia and those Ragged School children, never having access to beauty; children today spend between six and seven hours a day in front of some kind of electronic device. The area over which we let our children roam free, has shrunk by 90% in a single generation and a child today, is three times more likely to be admitted to hospital for falling out of bed, than falling out of a tree. Now, I'm not in favour children falling out of trees, just to make that clear, but I am in favour of children having access to nature and beauty and after all, David Attenborough said – ‘People will only protect what they care about and they’ll only care about what they've experienced.’ – so this idea that our children are growing up detached from nature is really worrying.

13 Perhaps this is the campaign I'm most proud of in my entire time at the National Trust. This is called ‘50 things to do before you're 11 ¾’ and this is about getting every child out there into nature, doing 50 things. It could be any 50 things but we had a great list, we had great fun drawing it up, about swinging on ropes and catching butterflies or whatever, but it's all about giving children that unfettered experience so that they grow up valuing the intangible things, the non-material things of life, the things that matter but money can't buy and, it does seem to me, absolutely at the heart of what we think of as a society, is the way we bring up our children and share with them, the joys of nature. It does seem to me, that beauty is one of those things that you can't measure, that you shouldn't measure, but if it's not part of decision making, if it isn't part of our lives, then we could lose something beyond price to us all, beyond value to us all, but it's completely

• irreplaceable. We need beauty. It's not just a luxury we have when our economy is
• functioning. It's central to who we are and the kind of people we are.

And so, I was inspired by the words of John Muir that great Scot, who went off and lived in America and was a founding figure of the US National Park system. He said – ‘We have to fight for beauty, we have to fight. It’s not blind opposition to progress but opposition to blind progress.’ – so that's why I am trying to revive the fight for beauty and I hope you’ll all join me. Thank you very much. Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE