(^158) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
towns, but now every village became accessible, and the beaches and
quiet sea-shore, up to this time known to the comparatively few people
interested in the bird-life there, were invaded by holiday-makers’.^116
The fact that many of the earliest nature reserves were important coastal
breeding sites is significant. There was much contemporary criticism of
‘assemblages of caravans and converted buses which have littered and spoilt
many a charming stretch of coast line’.^117 In the words of the Council for the
Protection of Rural England in 1936, the period following the end of World
War I had witnessed ‘a national movement seawards’.^118
The CPRE, formed in 1926, had no intention of acquiring tracts of land
for conservation, but instead acted as a pressure group, protecting the
countryside from urban expansion and from the more general threats posed
by modernity and motor cars. Clough Williams-Ellis, Patrick Abercrombie
and other leading members were appalled by the unplanned, scruffy sprawl
of the inter-war years – the suburbs, road signs, adverts, holiday shacks,
and petrol stations which formed, in the title of Williams-Ellis’s famous
book, ‘The Octopus’ that was strangling rural England.^119 But as Matlass
has argued, the founders of the CPRE were not simply backward-looking
reactionaries, nostalgically hanging on to a disappearing rural world.^120
They had an essentially modernist agenda which prioritised the importance
of state planning against the laissez-faire attitudes of the Victorian past
- asserting, in effect, the public over the private interest. The aims of the
society, as stated in 1926, were to ‘preserve all things of true value and
beauty’, but also to ensure ‘the scientific and orderly development of all local
resources’.^121 Many of the society’s leading figures, like Abercrombie, were
members of the emerging profession of town planners, and closely involved
in the development of planning controls described in the next chapter.
As ideas of state intervention and large-scale spatial planning became more
and more acceptable in the inter-War years, eventually triumphing during
World War II, the concept that particular areas should be earmarked for
nature conservation – as well as zoned for housing, industry or agricultural
use – also came to seem more reasonable. So too did the idea that wider areas
of scenic beauty should be subject to particularly tight planning controls. The
CPRE argued for the creation of National Parks almost from its inception and
persuaded the government to accept the idea in principal in 1931. Nothing
was done in practice, however, largely because of financial constraints, but
pressure continued, particularly from John Dower whose pamphlet The Case
for National Parks in Great Britain was published in 1938.^122 The Society
for the Promotion of Nature Reserves also continued to lobby actively,
organizing an influential conference on ‘Nature Preservation in Post-War
Reconstruction’ in 1941. The recovery of agriculture and the intensification
of farming which came with the outbreak of War in 1939 caused widespread
alarm among naturalists. As one observer put it in 1942: ‘At the present
time we see a great drive being made to bring into cultivation many more