Exploring the UK's natural beauty
Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty – 50 years on
Fifty years ago, the first of a new type of protected area was established along the Gower coast of Wales. Called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB, this designation was created to protect the most beautiful and distinctive landscapes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and yet for much of the half century since, the AONBs have maintained a very low profile. Nigel Hicks finds out what has been happening to our most scenic countryside.
AONB facts and figures
Number of AONBs:
England 36
Wales 4
Northern Ireland 11
Scotland 39
(National Scenic Areas)
Total area protected:
England 20,433 sq km
Wales 718 sq km
Northern Ireland 2,348 sq km
Scotland 10,018 sq km
Total: 33,517 sq km
Oldest AONB: Gower (Wales), 1956
Newest AONB: Tamar Valley
(Devon/Cornwall border), 1999
Smallest AONB:
Isles of Scilly, 16 sq km
Largest AONB:
Cotswolds, 2,038 sq km
Get out into the countryside, venture down the narrowest lanes, find a viewpoint and look out across the landscape. In many parts of lowland Britain, you’ll see a rolling agricultural panorama, a patchwork of fields, hedges and woodlands, a church spire rising from a village or small town, perhaps an expanse of water glinting in the sunlight in the distance. Close by, you’ll most likely hear the gentle hum of bees; overhead, you might detect the mournful wail of a buzzard.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is some romantic, idyllic vision of nature at its unachievable best, but you would be wrong. For one thing, it isn’t unachievable, but quite real across large swathes of the countryside. For another, it isn’t natural, but almost entirely manmade. The rolling hills are natural enough, it’s true, as are the wild plants and animals that live on them, but their arrangement across those hills is almost entirely down to human design, initiated many hundreds of years ago and then further honed down the centuries by a rural population with farming practicalities in mind.
It was only during the 20th century that we realised that we actually rather like the resulting arrangement, that it’s rather beautiful and, indeed, quintessentially British. Since then, the battle has been on to preserve that landscape, no longer so much for its agricultural importance as for our vision of what constitutes the beauty of our countryside and
the importance of the plants and animals that inhabit it, and for the link that it provides with traditional British culture, history and rural life.
This is the territory of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – as a title, it’s a tragically terrible piece of bureaucrat-speak, but as an accolade, it’s responsible for protecting the best of lowland rural areas from the worst ravages of so-called development in 21st- century Britain. Despite this, and despite celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the AONB system remains largely unknown to anyone who doesn’t live in one, despite the fact that 14 per cent of the country lies within either an AONB or the Scottish equivalent, a National Scenic Area – a far greater area than our national parks.
Struggling for status
Created by the same legislation that led to the national parks – the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act – the AONBs were established to conserve the beauty of the best of largely lowland rural Britain’s populated agricultural landscapes. This made them quite distinct from the national parks, which themselves were deliberately created in more remote, mainly upland areas that had large expanses of open land suitable not only for nature conservation, but also for the promotion of recreation. They were also designed to be run quite differently, the parks developing their own bureaucracies, complete with planning powers, large staffs and central funding, while the AONBs remained tied to local government, with a tiny core staff and relatively meagre finances.
With such a comparison, it has been difficult not to see the AONBs as a poor cousin to the national parks. Not so, according to Mike Taylor, chief executive officer of the National Association of AONBs. “Financially, they are poorer, it’s true, but certainly not in terms of the land they protect,” he says. “In my view, the AONBs conserve our finest countryside bar none, including the national parks.” So how is it that such an extensive and apparently important protected-areas system could have maintained such a low profile for so long? A large part of the explanation may lie in a fatal flaw in the original Act. While it gave local government and other public bodies a legal responsibility to support the national parks, no such legally binding support was afforded to the AONBs. Not surprisingly, as a result, not as much was achieved with the AONBs as might have been hoped. “The first 30 years were largely spent designating and demarcating them, and yet despite this, they’ve been largely successful in preventing the kind of rampant development that has afflicted many other parts of Britain since the 1950s,” Taylor says.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s that things really started to happen. “There was a generally increasing feeling [in both the conservation world and government] that something ought to be done with the AONBs to improve their status,” says Taylor. Things kicked off in 1998 with the Countryside Commission (now known as the Countryside Agency) – the government body responsible for designating English AONBs – which took the opportunity afforded by a change of government to publish a report on the AONBs, entitled Protecting our Finest Countryside: Advice to Government.
Sounding like a cry for help with a strong ‘use it or lose it’ message, the report outlined a series of measures that were needed if the AONBs were to become more than just lines on a map. These included legal responsibilities for local government and other public bodies, obligatory management plans, stakeholder involvement and consultation, and proper central government funding.
“The government accepted everything in the report,” says Taylor, “except, typically, the funding.” The report, along with a number of other countryside issues, led to the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CROW), enacted in 2000, which – in addition to a separate affirmation by the government that AONBs have the same level of legal protection as national parks – has rejuvenated the entire existence of the AONBs. “The history of the AONB can be divided into pre- and post-2000,” says Adam Wallace, senior countryside officer at the Countryside Agency. “We are now in a whole new phase of their existence, with a much clearer, articulated and active programme for their conservation.”
Local authorities are now obliged not only to actively manage AONBs in their area, but also to ensure that development in and close to them is consistent with the aims of landscape and nature conservation. “One of the aims of the AONB,” says Wallace, “is the promotion of sustainable development. So allowable developments are likely to be
of a scale appropriate to the designated area, often using local, traditional materials and techniques.” A new small-scale grants scheme administered by each AONB can allow such small developments to side-step the normal, rather cumbersome funding processes, helping such projects to get off the ground.
Challenges ahead
The profile of the AONB is clearly rising as a result of the CROW Act, which must bode well for their future protection. According to Wallace, the three main challenges for the future are the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), population pressure and global warming. “Global warming is the big unknown for all of us,” he explains. “We can be sure that as temperatures rise, so our AONBs will change, but in what ways we really aren’t sure yet.”
As for the CAP, past policies that pushed farmers to concentrate on maximising crop yields had a disastrous impact on large areas of Britain’s countryside. Recent changes that now reward farmers for countryside stewardship and conservation should help the AONBs. “The blunt instruments of the CAP have been quite a problem,” says Wallace, “but we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to help farmers down a different route.”
Population and development pressures are likely to be the major challenges for the future. With their concentration in lowland southern England, AONBs are, inevitably, close to large urban areas and all of the pressures they exert, from tourism to big infrastructure and housing development projects.
At the heart of the struggle to ensure the AONBs’ wellbeing is the planning process, which is hopefully aimed at keeping development programmes inside their designated zones and away from protected countryside. While the national park authorities have control of planning within their areas – which should ensure the dominance of conservation issues in any planning decision – AONBs are dependent on local government, the very same bodies responsible for development.
While it’s obvious that this could lead to a conflict of interest, both Taylor and Wallace are quite sanguine about the system’s ability to work. “Part of the work of AONB staff [in local government] is to ensure that planners are aware of their legal responsibilities towards AONB areas, as well as central government’s present policies and general views on the need for conservation,” explains Wallace. “In this way, we can usually strike a balance ensuring the interests of the AONB are protected.”
The implication here is that protection from encroaching development hinges more on persuasion and compromise than on the force of law, something that could see the edges of a protected area being gradually nibbled away until little is left to protect. “Which is why you state clearly from the beginning what the AONB’s purpose and goals are in a well-thought-out management plan,” says Wallace.
Others are less optimistic. At the annual AONB conference last July, Tom Oliver, head of rural policy at the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said that “many AONBs are under greater threat than ever before”. Given the big increase in AONB status since 2000, this seems difficult to believe, but Oliver is adamant. “It’s partly due to the sheer length of the list of proposed projects threatening to encroach on AONBs, and partly down to a growing anti-conservation groundswell in government,” he explains.
The list he presents is indeed long, ranging from large-scale wind farms in and near several AONBs, increasing noise levels due to regional airport developments, a new road scheme around Weymouth, a proposed football stadium in the South Downs and – possibly most explosive of all – a huge new science park and housing development at Wye,
in the Kent Downs AONB (see Will the Kent Downs be sacrificed on the altar of science?). “This long list is a part of the increasing swing against conservation in the government,” Oliver explains. “Up until about 2000, the government was very pro-conservation, but since then, there has been an increasing feeling that protection of our landscape is in some way preventing Britain from competing in the world economy, particularly against China and India. “This argument seems to want to make Britain compete on China’s and India’s terms,” he continues, “when instead we should be playing to our strengths, which include an environment that is in quite good condition, with strong links to our history and traditions. These are the very factors that we know attract millions of overseas visitors to Britain, as well as providing huge scope for domestic tourism and leisure, factors vital to the health of the nation.”
Mixed messages
If Oliver’s analysis is correct, then the present success of the AONBs results from a short-lived love affair that the government had with the environment between 1997 and 2000, something that could start to evaporate if a post-2000 scepticism starts to gain the upper hand. According to Oliver, that scepticism is already starting to attack the planning system and the very concept of protected landscapes.
“We have a very disciplined planning system that has been highly effective in preventing the kind of tacky urban sprawl you see in North America and parts of continental Europe, and it should be allowed to continue to do its job,” he explains. Despite this success, he says, the government is presently considering ways to allow infrastructure developments not only to short-circuit the planning process, but actually to go ahead free of any environmental considerations.
If implemented, such a policy could see the demise of both the AONBs and the national parks. All of this makes Oliver rather pessimistic about the next 50 years. “The future survival of the AONBs depends,” he says, “on whether or not we win the ongoing argument in government over the importance of conservation. At present, the anti-conservationists seem to be winning.”
It’s a view strongly at odds with that of Mike Taylor. “We’re presently getting quite positive signals from the government,” he says, “and also from the opposition. So although
I think the next couple of years may be rather bumpy while we sort out funding, I think the long-term future is quite good.” Whichever view turns out to be the nearest to the truth, next time you look out over some rolling countryside and think what a glorious view it is, remember that if we want the UK to continue far into the future as a green and pleasant land, we have to ensure now that that protection remains effective against those who don’t care.
Will the Kent Downs be sacrificed on the altar of science?
Imperial College London is planning to turn an agricultural college it owns in the rural village of Wye in eastern Kent into a science park. On the surface, the proposal may not sound unreasonable, but it involves not just redevelopment of the present college’s buildings, but urbanisation of several hundred acres of the college’s own farmland under a huge housing development, all of it in the heart of the Kent Downs AONB. According to objectors, the main aim isn’t really to promote good science, but to generate profit to help with developments at Imperial’s main site in London.
Local residents first heard of the plan in December last year, when the college signed concordats with both Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council, underlining their support for the proposal, despite it clearly being against the interests of a protected landscape and thus in conflict with their planning responsibilities. “Since they are the planning bodies that any planning application would go to, we must have serious doubts about whether there would be any effective planning process for this project,” complains Tom Oliver of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
There is some suspicion that, with central government apparently making encouraging noises, there may be attempts to steam-roller the project through that planning process. This is despite the fact that, according to Oliver, the entire scheme flies completely in the face of the local development plan, with the proposed construction to occur not only inside an AONB, but also only a few kilometres from a development zone, in Ashford, earmarked for exactly this type of development.
According to local objectors, documents recently released to them under the Freedom of Information Act show that both Imperial and local government have been deliberately vague and misleading about just how far advanced the proposals are. These findings, they say, further fuel fears that democracy is being compromised in the name of an inappropriate development that will literally drive a bulldozer through the effectiveness of laws designed to protect our most beautiful landscapes.
The Countryside Agency mutates again
Just a few years after the government body responsible for designating AONBs in England changed its name from the Countryside Commission to the Countryside Agency, the body
is to mutate again. From October this year, the Agency’s two arms will be separated, its Rural Development Service becoming an independent body – the Commission for Rural Communities – while the Landscape, Access and Recreation division, which is responsible for environmental conservation, will merge with English Nature to create Natural England.
The aim is to bring the environment and wildlife-conservation roles of English Nature and the Countryside Agency under one banner, making it more effective in the cause of conservation.
November 2006
Fifty years ago, the first of a new type of protected area was established along the Gower coast of Wales. Called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB, this designation was created to protect the most beautiful and distinctive landscapes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and yet for much of the half century since, the AONBs have maintained a very low profile. Nigel Hicks finds out what has been happening to our most scenic countryside.
AONB facts and figures
Number of AONBs:
England 36
Wales 4
Northern Ireland 11
Scotland 39
(National Scenic Areas)
Total area protected:
England 20,433 sq km
Wales 718 sq km
Northern Ireland 2,348 sq km
Scotland 10,018 sq km
Total: 33,517 sq km
Oldest AONB: Gower (Wales), 1956
Newest AONB: Tamar Valley
(Devon/Cornwall border), 1999
Smallest AONB:
Isles of Scilly, 16 sq km
Largest AONB:
Cotswolds, 2,038 sq km
Get out into the countryside, venture down the narrowest lanes, find a viewpoint and look out across the landscape. In many parts of lowland Britain, you’ll see a rolling agricultural panorama, a patchwork of fields, hedges and woodlands, a church spire rising from a village or small town, perhaps an expanse of water glinting in the sunlight in the distance. Close by, you’ll most likely hear the gentle hum of bees; overhead, you might detect the mournful wail of a buzzard.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is some romantic, idyllic vision of nature at its unachievable best, but you would be wrong. For one thing, it isn’t unachievable, but quite real across large swathes of the countryside. For another, it isn’t natural, but almost entirely manmade. The rolling hills are natural enough, it’s true, as are the wild plants and animals that live on them, but their arrangement across those hills is almost entirely down to human design, initiated many hundreds of years ago and then further honed down the centuries by a rural population with farming practicalities in mind.
It was only during the 20th century that we realised that we actually rather like the resulting arrangement, that it’s rather beautiful and, indeed, quintessentially British. Since then, the battle has been on to preserve that landscape, no longer so much for its agricultural importance as for our vision of what constitutes the beauty of our countryside and
the importance of the plants and animals that inhabit it, and for the link that it provides with traditional British culture, history and rural life.
This is the territory of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – as a title, it’s a tragically terrible piece of bureaucrat-speak, but as an accolade, it’s responsible for protecting the best of lowland rural areas from the worst ravages of so-called development in 21st- century Britain. Despite this, and despite celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the AONB system remains largely unknown to anyone who doesn’t live in one, despite the fact that 14 per cent of the country lies within either an AONB or the Scottish equivalent, a National Scenic Area – a far greater area than our national parks.
Struggling for status
Created by the same legislation that led to the national parks – the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act – the AONBs were established to conserve the beauty of the best of largely lowland rural Britain’s populated agricultural landscapes. This made them quite distinct from the national parks, which themselves were deliberately created in more remote, mainly upland areas that had large expanses of open land suitable not only for nature conservation, but also for the promotion of recreation. They were also designed to be run quite differently, the parks developing their own bureaucracies, complete with planning powers, large staffs and central funding, while the AONBs remained tied to local government, with a tiny core staff and relatively meagre finances.
With such a comparison, it has been difficult not to see the AONBs as a poor cousin to the national parks. Not so, according to Mike Taylor, chief executive officer of the National Association of AONBs. “Financially, they are poorer, it’s true, but certainly not in terms of the land they protect,” he says. “In my view, the AONBs conserve our finest countryside bar none, including the national parks.” So how is it that such an extensive and apparently important protected-areas system could have maintained such a low profile for so long? A large part of the explanation may lie in a fatal flaw in the original Act. While it gave local government and other public bodies a legal responsibility to support the national parks, no such legally binding support was afforded to the AONBs. Not surprisingly, as a result, not as much was achieved with the AONBs as might have been hoped. “The first 30 years were largely spent designating and demarcating them, and yet despite this, they’ve been largely successful in preventing the kind of rampant development that has afflicted many other parts of Britain since the 1950s,” Taylor says.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s that things really started to happen. “There was a generally increasing feeling [in both the conservation world and government] that something ought to be done with the AONBs to improve their status,” says Taylor. Things kicked off in 1998 with the Countryside Commission (now known as the Countryside Agency) – the government body responsible for designating English AONBs – which took the opportunity afforded by a change of government to publish a report on the AONBs, entitled Protecting our Finest Countryside: Advice to Government.
Sounding like a cry for help with a strong ‘use it or lose it’ message, the report outlined a series of measures that were needed if the AONBs were to become more than just lines on a map. These included legal responsibilities for local government and other public bodies, obligatory management plans, stakeholder involvement and consultation, and proper central government funding.
“The government accepted everything in the report,” says Taylor, “except, typically, the funding.” The report, along with a number of other countryside issues, led to the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CROW), enacted in 2000, which – in addition to a separate affirmation by the government that AONBs have the same level of legal protection as national parks – has rejuvenated the entire existence of the AONBs. “The history of the AONB can be divided into pre- and post-2000,” says Adam Wallace, senior countryside officer at the Countryside Agency. “We are now in a whole new phase of their existence, with a much clearer, articulated and active programme for their conservation.”
Local authorities are now obliged not only to actively manage AONBs in their area, but also to ensure that development in and close to them is consistent with the aims of landscape and nature conservation. “One of the aims of the AONB,” says Wallace, “is the promotion of sustainable development. So allowable developments are likely to be
of a scale appropriate to the designated area, often using local, traditional materials and techniques.” A new small-scale grants scheme administered by each AONB can allow such small developments to side-step the normal, rather cumbersome funding processes, helping such projects to get off the ground.
Start the slideshow (6 pictures)
Challenges ahead
The profile of the AONB is clearly rising as a result of the CROW Act, which must bode well for their future protection. According to Wallace, the three main challenges for the future are the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), population pressure and global warming. “Global warming is the big unknown for all of us,” he explains. “We can be sure that as temperatures rise, so our AONBs will change, but in what ways we really aren’t sure yet.”
As for the CAP, past policies that pushed farmers to concentrate on maximising crop yields had a disastrous impact on large areas of Britain’s countryside. Recent changes that now reward farmers for countryside stewardship and conservation should help the AONBs. “The blunt instruments of the CAP have been quite a problem,” says Wallace, “but we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to help farmers down a different route.”
Population and development pressures are likely to be the major challenges for the future. With their concentration in lowland southern England, AONBs are, inevitably, close to large urban areas and all of the pressures they exert, from tourism to big infrastructure and housing development projects.
At the heart of the struggle to ensure the AONBs’ wellbeing is the planning process, which is hopefully aimed at keeping development programmes inside their designated zones and away from protected countryside. While the national park authorities have control of planning within their areas – which should ensure the dominance of conservation issues in any planning decision – AONBs are dependent on local government, the very same bodies responsible for development.
While it’s obvious that this could lead to a conflict of interest, both Taylor and Wallace are quite sanguine about the system’s ability to work. “Part of the work of AONB staff [in local government] is to ensure that planners are aware of their legal responsibilities towards AONB areas, as well as central government’s present policies and general views on the need for conservation,” explains Wallace. “In this way, we can usually strike a balance ensuring the interests of the AONB are protected.”
The implication here is that protection from encroaching development hinges more on persuasion and compromise than on the force of law, something that could see the edges of a protected area being gradually nibbled away until little is left to protect. “Which is why you state clearly from the beginning what the AONB’s purpose and goals are in a well-thought-out management plan,” says Wallace.
Others are less optimistic. At the annual AONB conference last July, Tom Oliver, head of rural policy at the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said that “many AONBs are under greater threat than ever before”. Given the big increase in AONB status since 2000, this seems difficult to believe, but Oliver is adamant. “It’s partly due to the sheer length of the list of proposed projects threatening to encroach on AONBs, and partly down to a growing anti-conservation groundswell in government,” he explains.
The list he presents is indeed long, ranging from large-scale wind farms in and near several AONBs, increasing noise levels due to regional airport developments, a new road scheme around Weymouth, a proposed football stadium in the South Downs and – possibly most explosive of all – a huge new science park and housing development at Wye,
in the Kent Downs AONB (see Will the Kent Downs be sacrificed on the altar of science?). “This long list is a part of the increasing swing against conservation in the government,” Oliver explains. “Up until about 2000, the government was very pro-conservation, but since then, there has been an increasing feeling that protection of our landscape is in some way preventing Britain from competing in the world economy, particularly against China and India. “This argument seems to want to make Britain compete on China’s and India’s terms,” he continues, “when instead we should be playing to our strengths, which include an environment that is in quite good condition, with strong links to our history and traditions. These are the very factors that we know attract millions of overseas visitors to Britain, as well as providing huge scope for domestic tourism and leisure, factors vital to the health of the nation.”
Mixed messages
If Oliver’s analysis is correct, then the present success of the AONBs results from a short-lived love affair that the government had with the environment between 1997 and 2000, something that could start to evaporate if a post-2000 scepticism starts to gain the upper hand. According to Oliver, that scepticism is already starting to attack the planning system and the very concept of protected landscapes.
“We have a very disciplined planning system that has been highly effective in preventing the kind of tacky urban sprawl you see in North America and parts of continental Europe, and it should be allowed to continue to do its job,” he explains. Despite this success, he says, the government is presently considering ways to allow infrastructure developments not only to short-circuit the planning process, but actually to go ahead free of any environmental considerations.
If implemented, such a policy could see the demise of both the AONBs and the national parks. All of this makes Oliver rather pessimistic about the next 50 years. “The future survival of the AONBs depends,” he says, “on whether or not we win the ongoing argument in government over the importance of conservation. At present, the anti-conservationists seem to be winning.”
It’s a view strongly at odds with that of Mike Taylor. “We’re presently getting quite positive signals from the government,” he says, “and also from the opposition. So although
I think the next couple of years may be rather bumpy while we sort out funding, I think the long-term future is quite good.” Whichever view turns out to be the nearest to the truth, next time you look out over some rolling countryside and think what a glorious view it is, remember that if we want the UK to continue far into the future as a green and pleasant land, we have to ensure now that that protection remains effective against those who don’t care.
Will the Kent Downs be sacrificed on the altar of science?
Imperial College London is planning to turn an agricultural college it owns in the rural village of Wye in eastern Kent into a science park. On the surface, the proposal may not sound unreasonable, but it involves not just redevelopment of the present college’s buildings, but urbanisation of several hundred acres of the college’s own farmland under a huge housing development, all of it in the heart of the Kent Downs AONB. According to objectors, the main aim isn’t really to promote good science, but to generate profit to help with developments at Imperial’s main site in London.
Local residents first heard of the plan in December last year, when the college signed concordats with both Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council, underlining their support for the proposal, despite it clearly being against the interests of a protected landscape and thus in conflict with their planning responsibilities. “Since they are the planning bodies that any planning application would go to, we must have serious doubts about whether there would be any effective planning process for this project,” complains Tom Oliver of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
There is some suspicion that, with central government apparently making encouraging noises, there may be attempts to steam-roller the project through that planning process. This is despite the fact that, according to Oliver, the entire scheme flies completely in the face of the local development plan, with the proposed construction to occur not only inside an AONB, but also only a few kilometres from a development zone, in Ashford, earmarked for exactly this type of development.
According to local objectors, documents recently released to them under the Freedom of Information Act show that both Imperial and local government have been deliberately vague and misleading about just how far advanced the proposals are. These findings, they say, further fuel fears that democracy is being compromised in the name of an inappropriate development that will literally drive a bulldozer through the effectiveness of laws designed to protect our most beautiful landscapes.
The Countryside Agency mutates again
Just a few years after the government body responsible for designating AONBs in England changed its name from the Countryside Commission to the Countryside Agency, the body
is to mutate again. From October this year, the Agency’s two arms will be separated, its Rural Development Service becoming an independent body – the Commission for Rural Communities – while the Landscape, Access and Recreation division, which is responsible for environmental conservation, will merge with English Nature to create Natural England.
The aim is to bring the environment and wildlife-conservation roles of English Nature and the Countryside Agency under one banner, making it more effective in the cause of conservation.
November 2006
