The Guardian view on England’s riverbanks: landscapes that everyone should be able to enjoy | Editorial
IThe country of Na is often said by the division, criticizing the state of rivers is one of the few unifying hobbies of England. Wastewater dumping, which occurred for almost 4 meters in English rivers and coastal waters last year, became a powerful source of anger, inspiring militants to grow with cleaner water. Despite the concern that people show for the rivers of England, however, it is remarkably difficult to walk along their banks, and even less to dive.
The Guardian’s recent report on the Dart river in Devon has shown that large sections of its bank are private, and many of them are difficult to access. Researcher Lewis Winks, who used land register data to map the property of the dart, revealed that the 47 -thousand long river has no less than 108 separate owners. The Duchy of Cornwall has 28 miles from RiveBank; Two aristocratic areas have 13 others; 11.6 miles are detained via offshore companies.
Wilks’s card gives an instantaneous of a national problem. Only 4% of English rivers are open to the public. As the demand for swimming points has increased, many paddles and kayakers have been reprimanded for intrusion. The paths alongside the rivers often wind far from their banks to avoid private land; You can “walk” along the river test in the Hampshire, for example, but a large part of its bank is inaccessible. In 2020, visitors to one of his rare access points found him blocked by a barbed wire door.
The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian that England was a “nation of nature lovers”. But the feudal models of land ownership of the nation have made a large part of nature out of limits. The formation of a deeper link with the environment can encourage people to take care of this. The campaigns for the status of swimming water, which oblige the environmental agency to improve the quality of the water in the rivers designated for swimming, testify. They are motivated by people who live these landscapes directly and therefore want to protect them.
Work has committed to improving access to nature and protecting fauna in its 2024 manifesto, but its ministers have since diluted the two promises. The new government planning bill will weaken environmental protections by allowing developers to compensate for their destruction of natural habitats, rather than avoiding such destruction to start. In opposition, work has promised to introduce the right to walk. To the government, he was sent back to this promise, leaning on the pressure of the groups of landowners.
His plan to create nine new “rivers walks” is a derisory compensation. The government has not given any details on the place where these walks will be located or how it creates them, and its plan will probably be thwarted by the same “permissive” access model to which activists oppose, where the rights of passage depend on the good will of individual landowners. To create a walk on the whole dart, each of its 108 landowners should voluntarily allow the public to use its land. The dart is small: the longer rivers will pose even more important challenges.
Land owners have long tried to protect their areas from public view. “Cachate the wealth,” writes land activist Guy Shrubsole, “is an integral part of preserving it”. A plan of the Minister of Housing Matthew Pennycook to open the land register will facilitate the fact that which has the rivers of England. But that is not far enough, because there is no guarantee that landowners allow the public to take advantage of these landscapes. It must surely change.
