It is CPRE’s centenary and this is the second resulting book. The first was an attempt, partially successful I thought – click here, to look forward. This is an account of the past, and is an informative and interesting, and therefore successful, one.
I don’t know that much about CPRE because it hasn’t cropped up lots in my decades as part of the environment movement. I vaguely felt that it was worthy but dull, an organisation for NIMBYs, and more National Trust than Greenpeace but that hardly nails it down very precisely even if those impressions were correct (which I assumed they weren’t). But CPRE has struggled with its role, I learn over the years. It has always been for Rural England (although more and more for Urban England too) but it started as the Council for Preservation, changed to Council for Protection and then again to Campaign to Protect and now seems to think it is ‘CPRE, the countryside charity’.
A fair proportion of the great and the good of the environment movement passed through a spell at CPRE from Fiona Reynolds to Robin Grove-White and Marion Shoard to Chris Hall.
This book says that it somewhat challenges the caricature that CPRE is irredeemably Tory in nature but only to the extent, I would say, that it is conservative with a small ‘c’ rather than a large one although there is a sprinkling of Liberals scattered through the book and even some Labour supporters. One can’t help but feel that a campaign for CPRE sometimes centres around a chat over lunch in the House of Lords rather than making the placards for a march on Downing Street. I was struck by the image of a poster from the 1960s which features a fist gripping a sword under the banner of ‘Guard the Countryside’ and the plea to ‘Send CPRE the funds for the fight’. I haven’t seen anything quite like that recently.
CPRE deserves all of our thanks, I believe, for its influence on the establishment of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, National Parks and the Green Belt. None has been a complete success but we are better off with their flawed versions than we would be if they were absent. CPRE has campaigned against light pollution, wind turbines, roads, nuclear power stations, HS2 and housing schemes all in the name of protecting, or preserving, the beauty and tranquility of the best bits of the English countryside. It would be difficult to live down the reputation of being somewhat NIMBYish since those most affected by a development in any particular place are often at the forefront of opposition to it. But to write off such opposition is not wholly fair – badly judged development should be opposed wherever it is and it is bound to be in somebody’s back yard.
There were some very general mentions of wildlife and biodiversity near the front of the book but that aspect of natural beauty features rarely overall. That must be why I was slightly unsighted as to CPRE’s work.
All organisations should have books written about their history and achievements every few decades. To learn about what happened, how they happened, why they happened and who made them happen is good preparation for changing the world and there is quite a lot of changing to be done, but this book is convincing in describing how changing the world has to be tempered with keeping the best of it somewhat the same for the best results.
No index – that’s a shame. The 16 pages of end notes (references) are primarily a long list of newspaper articles and CPRE annual reports, all of which are challenging for the ordinary reader to track down (I spent some time trying, but the time spent in pursuit seemed unlikely to be paid off by a great prize at the end, so I stopped). The excellent Foreword by someone called Simon Murray doesn’t tell the reader who is Simon Murray so I had to Google him to find out.
The cover? Unattractive, which may, of course, be the point, but it’s better at being simply unattractive than making me think of the beauty that is threatened. I’d give it 4/10.
Protecting the Countryside : the first century of CPRE by Matthew Kelly is published by Little Toller.
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