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18 hours ago
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“When I show people this, they think it’s Mordor,” says landscape architecture professor Kathryn Moore with a smile.
She is pointing at a map of the West Midlands. But instead of buildings, roads and a sprawling canal network, this map shows the natural hills and undulations that lie below the human-made architecture.
“The whole region is like a basin, and it’s actually at the junction of two of the biggest river systems of the UK, but nobody ever thinks of it in that way,” Moore says. “The way we conceive of the region is the way the maps present it and they only concentrate on the roads, the railways, the buildings.”
Moore is the director of the West Midlands National Park Lab at Birmingham City University, a pioneering project that imagines a future in which the whole region, including Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country, is a type of national park.
She accepts that getting an official designation for the park, under current national park laws, is unlikely. It would probably require a change in law – the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 was designed to exclude urban areas to protect nature. And plans for new national parks in the UK can be contentious: in Wales, for example, proposals for a new national park in the north of the country have been met with local outcry.
Moore is more interested in using her idea to change the way people think about landscape in urban areas, and in putting the region on the map for a commitment to greenery.
“It will never be the same as the Peak District – it can’t be. But it could be something different,” she said. “If I said to any of the local authorities in this region, ‘I’m going to take away your planning control,’ there would be uproar – there’s no point in even thinking about that, it can’t be done like that.”
The project is driven by a number of ambitions – for instance, that all children should be able to see a tree from their bedroom window, or see the stars – that would inspire organisations to work together to promote better landscape use throughout the region.
“People have said, ‘don’t you want a [national park] designation, Kathryn?’ I thought, well, not if it is like it is now,” she said. “It’s not about having a checklist, you don’t have to have a red line all the way around it. It’s about seeing landscape as the relationship people have with their territory, wherever they live – even if it’s just where they sit on the doorstep and have a cup of coffee in the morning.”
Other goals for the national park include all residents having access to walking and cycling routes, clean air, and a local park to picnic in. Ultimately, everyone “should know they live in the West Midlands national park and be proud of it”, Moore says.
When she first launched the idea six years ago, Moore raised quite a few eyebrows with her bold ambition for something so daring and unique. “There’s still some people who just think you can’t possibly do this,” she said. “It’s really about changing attitudes and perceptions, challenging existing behaviours, inspiring people to act differently. It’s an approach, wherever you are, to the way we think about development and change and transformation.”
Moore says steps towards this is are already happening, even without an official designation, through the conversations her idea has triggered and the West Midlands national park awards, which honour projects around reimagining landscapes in the region.
While the former prime minister Rishi Sunak did previously announce the search for a new national park site in England, there has been little word from the new Labour government, and Natural England is not formally considering any new designations.
For Moore, that’s no reason to slow down her work. “Someone said to me: ‘It’ll be really nice when the trees are planted and the swings are in.’ But it’s really not about that. That might well be part of it, but it’s really about changing attitudes towards land use. And we can start doing that now.”
