Guy Shrubsole is a British researcher, writer and campaigner. He wrote Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back, [1] and, most recently, The Lost Rainforests of Britain. [2]
Shrubsole was born in Newbury, Berkshire [3] and attended St Bartholomew's School. [4]
Shrubsole researched who owns the land in England for his first book. [5] In August 2020, he and Nick Hayes launched a campaign on freedom to roam in England, called Right to Roam. [6] In July 2021, Shrubsole and Hayes collaborated with Landscapes of Freedom and David Bangs to organise a mass trespass on the Sussex Downs to raise awareness of the failings of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, which Shrubsole criticises for its limitations. [7] [8]
He used to work as Policy and Campaigns Coordinator at Rewilding Britain. [9]
Shrubsole's Lost Rainforests of Britain campaign attempts to find, map, photograph, and restore the Atlantic Oakwood forests, woodlands variously referred to in Britain as Upland Oakwoods, Atlantic Oakwoods, Western Oakwoods, Temperate Rainforest, Caledonian forest, and colloquially as Celtic Rainforests. [10] His book on the subject was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society Literary Prize [11] and longlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation. [12]
Shrubsole is set to publish a third book with William Collins. [13]
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British journalist, author, and environmental and political activist. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and has written several books.
Temperate rainforests are rainforests with coniferous or broadleaf forests that occur in the temperate zone and receive heavy rain.
The mass trespass of Kinder Scout was a trespass protest at Kinder Scout in the Peak District, Derbyshire, England, on 24 April 1932. The protest sought to highlight that walkers were denied access to areas of open countryside which had been fenced off by wealthy landowners who forbade public access. It was organised by communist leader and Jewish anti-fascist Benny Rothman, the secretary of the British Workers' Sports Federation and a member of the Young Communist League.
Adam Nicolson, is an English author who has written about history, landscape, great literature and the sea. He is also the 5th Baron Carnock, but does not use the title.
Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Pyecombe is a village and civil parish in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, England. Pyecombe is located 7 miles (11 km) to the north of Brighton. The civil parish covers an area of 887 hectares and has a population of 200, increasing at the 2011 Census to a population of 237.
Wistman's Wood is one of Britain's last remaining ancient temperate rainforests and one of three remote high-altitude oakwoods on Dartmoor in Devon, England. The first written document to mention Wistman's Wood date to the 1600s, while more recent tree-ring studies show that individual trees could be many hundreds of years old.
Even before the Norman Conquest, there was a strong tradition of landholding in Anglo-Saxon law. When William the Conqueror asserted sovereignty over England in 1066, he confiscated the property of the recalcitrant English landowners. Over the next dozen years, he granted land to his lords and to the dispossessed Englishmen, or affirmed their existing land holdings, in exchange for fealty and promises of military and other services. At the time of the Domesday Book, all land in England was held by someone, and from that time there has been no allodial land in England. In order to legitimise the notion of the Crown's paramount lordship, a legal fiction—that all land titles were held by the King's subjects as a result of a royal grant—was adopted.
Ramblers is the trading name of the Ramblers Association Great Britain's walking charity. The Ramblers is also a membership organisation with around 100,000 members and a network of volunteers who maintain and protect the path network. The organisation was founded in 1935 and campaigns to keep the British countryside open to all.
Westdene is an area of the city of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex. It is an affluent northern suburb of the city, west of Patcham, the A23 and the London to Brighton railway line, north of Withdean and northeast of West Blatchington. It is on the Brighton side of the historic parish boundary between Brighton and Hove and is served by Preston Park railway station. It is known for its greenery and woodland and is very close to the South Downs, from which it is separated by the Brighton Bypass, and was built on the slopes of two hills.
Marion Shoard is a British writer and campaigner. She is best known for her work concerning access to the countryside and land use conflicts. In 2002 she became the first person to give a name to the "edgelands" between town and country. Since 2004 she has also written and campaigned about older people's issues.
Isabella Tree, Lady Burrell is a British author and conservationist. She is author of the Richard Jefferies Society Literature Award-winning book Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm that describes the creation of Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England. The 3,500-acre (1,400-hectare) wildland project was created in the grounds of Knepp Castle, the ancestral home of her husband, Sir Charles Burrell, a landowner and conservationist.
Knepp Wildland is the first major lowland rewilding project in England. It comprises 1,400 hectares of former arable and dairy farmland in the grounds of Knepp Castle, in West Sussex.
David Bangs is a field naturalist, social historian, public artist, author and conservationist. He has written extensively on the countryside management, both historically and present day in the English county of Sussex.
Nick Hayes is a British writer, illustrator, and campaigner for land access. He has written a number of graphic novels and a non-fiction book, The Book of Trespass.
Jim Crumley is a Scottish journalist, a former newspaper editor and regular columnist for the Dundee Courier and The Scots Magazine. He is also the author of more than 40 books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscapes of Scotland, many of them making the case for species reintroductions, or ‘rewilding’. His Seasons series, a quartet of books exploring the wildlife and landscapes and how climate change is affecting our environment across the four seasons, is highly acclaimed. The Nature of Autumn was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017. The Nature of Spring was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The Nature of Summer, published in 2020, was shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book Prize. His most recent book, Lakeland Wild, is his first to focus entirely on an English landscape.
Sea rewilding is an area of environmental conservation activity which focuses on rewilding, restoring ocean life and returning seas to a more natural state. Sea rewilding projects operate around the world, working to repopulate a wide range of organisms, including giant clams, sharks, skates, sea sturgeons, and many other species. Rewilding marine and coastal ecosystems offer potential ways to mitigate climate change and sequester carbon. Sea rewilding projects are currently less common than those focusing on rewilding land, and seas are under increasing stress from the blue economy – commercial activities which further stress the marine environment. Rewilding projects held near coastal communities can economically benefit local businesses as well as individuals and communities a whole.
Lee Schofield is a British naturalist and nature writer. He wrote Wild Fell: Fighting for Nature on a Lake District Hill Farm, which describes his work as site manager for the RSPB at Haweswater in the Lake District National Park.
The Lustleigh Cleave is a steep sided valley above the River Bovey in the parish of Lustleigh on Dartmoor. The cleave has been noted for its beauty since the 1800s, and features extensively in guidebooks.
The Lost Rainforests of Britain is a non-fiction book by British author and environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole. The book explores the existence and ecological importance of temperate rainforests in Britain, sometimes referred to as Celtic rainforests, which are often overlooked or forgotten. Shrubsole aims to raise awareness about these unique habitats and advocate for their preservation and restoration. It won the 2023 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.