Public support for Green Belt: common rights in countryside access and recreation

ABSTRACT

Public support for Green Belt in England is legendary but is often dismissed as sentimental attachment. The aim of this paper is to situate public support for Green Belt within a history of common rights and access campaigns and a specific cultural landscape of outdoor recreation. This paper contends that Green Belt in England carries notions of common rights established in struggles against the enclosure and privatisation of open spaces from the early nineteenth century and predicated on an understanding that the policy conveys a communal interest in land and landscape. It argues that contemporary public affection for Green Belts is expressed through practices of ‘commoning’ or the performance of claimed common rights of property. Drawing on field research with a popular campaign in North West England, the paper evidences the deployment of a history of access struggles to preserve Green Belt as recreational amenity and accessible countryside. In the perception of Green Belt as a collective resource the paper posits the continuing relevance of common rights to planning policy. It concludes that a clearer understanding of popular support for Green Belt may provide planning scholarship with new perspectives on notions of public good and the use rights of property.

KEYWORDS:

• Green Belt
• open spaces
• public access
• countryside

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Quintin Bradley is a Senior Lecturer in Planning and Housing at Leeds Beckett University, and leads a research programme into neighbourhood and community planning, with a particular focus on public engagement in questions of housing supply and housing allocations. His published work deals with issues of popular contention in planning and housing and the role of social movements in urban policy. He is the joint editor of ‘Localism and Neighbourhood Planning: power to the people?’ published by Policy Press in January 2017 and is the author of ‘The Tenants’ Movement’ published by Routledge in 2015.

ORCID

Quintin Bradley http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3447-2527