Recreational access to the countryside of England and Wales: Popular leisure as the legitimation of private property

Summary

From its modern origins, associated with the urbanizing effect of industrialization, walking has remained a popular form of outdoor recreation. It has, furthermore, remained an important site of class struggle, with the ‘landless’ seeking to establish their moral ‘citizen’ right to roam over open country in contradistinction to the ‘landed’, who have successfully limited this right to legally‐defined public rights of way. In the face of declining farm incomes, however, farmers and landowners have, apparently, modified their attitudes towards public access, but only in return for compensation and management payments under new grant schemes. With the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) now seeking to extend paid access arrangements to its grant schemes, access ‘rights’ are assuming an increasingly commodified form, thereby questioning the former citizen claims while simultaneously reinforcing the hegemony of private property. Rather than being a benefit of citizenship, the existence of limited public rights of way has tied inextricably the extension of legally‐enforcible access to the needs of the owners of private property. At a time of falling prosperity in agriculture, therefore, these owners have now exercised the hegemony of their property by annexing the populism of consumer culture to reproduce the bourgeois liberal values of the market as a principal determinant of the extension of citizen ‘rights’ of access to the countryside.

Keywords:

• private property rights
• outdoor recreation
• rights of way
• agricultural policy