Wildlife in depression, C.1870–1940^139rapidly after c.1860. The population of England continued to rise rapidly,
increasing from around 19 million to over 34 million by the outbreak of the
First World War and reaching around 40 million by 1950.^9 But in addition,
people became less densely packed into towns and cities. This was not
primarily the consequence of the influence of social reformers, who railed
against the squalor of overcrowded urban areas, but rather of technological
developments, which allowed people to live at a distance from where they
worked, and which permitted industry to disperse more widely, away from
spatially restricted sources of energy. The British rail network expanded
from around 6,800 miles in 1851 to 23,000 miles by 1914; but by this stage,
cars and in particular buses had arrived on the scene.^10 In 1920, 200,000
cars were registered in Britain; by 1930 this figure had grown to nearly a
million.^11 Of equal importance was the development of mains electricity. This
was initially – from the later nineteenth century – produced and disseminated
on a local basis, but in 1926 the Central Electricity Board was established,
and by 1933 a series of regional grids with auxiliary interconnections for
emergency use was in place. This fuelled what Hudson has described as a
‘second industrial revolution’, with an expansion of light engineering and
manufacturing in southern England and the Midlands, accompanied by a
decline in traditional heavy industries in the north and west.^12 Housing and
industry, for a range of reasons, thus expanded further and further, gobbling
up the countryside and its wildlife as it did so.
In fact, all the views baldly summarized in the foregoing paragraphs, while
containing some truth, are misleading in a number of respects. This was not
a ‘golden age’ for wildlife in the countryside, nor were the effects of mass
urbanization as drastic or as unremittingly negative as many have suggested.
In addition, there were other, more subtle social and economic changes – the
development of large-scale state planning and the final demise of traditional
management practices, especially on commons and other marginal land –
which were to have equally profound impacts on the natural environment.
Benign neglect?
It is important at the outset to emphasize that the period between the 1870s
and the outbreak of World War II was not one of unrelieved gloom in
farming, and that the scale of depression was to some extent exaggerated
by a farming industry now dependent on government intervention, and by
right-wing writers like Henry Williamson or Adrian Bell, for whom the state
of the countryside was used as a metaphor for the supposed moral decline
of the nation more generally.^13 In reality, the fortunes of many livestock
producers held up well as prices for cereals, and thus supplementary feed,
fell dramatically, while even those of arable farmers varied over time, and
were helped in many eastern areas by the cultivation, from the 1920s, of a
new crop, sugar beet. The main consequence of depression was that farmers