The UK has 15 National Parks - ten in England, three in Wales and two in Scotland. The first ten were designated in the 1950s. The Norfolk Broads got the nod in 1989. Scotland's two and the south coast pair joined them in the 2000s. Nothing's been added since.
They're not especially well spread out. This is mainly for geographical reasons, the majority of National Parks being in hilly or mountainous areas, which is why none of the original ten lay south of a line joining Exeter to Hull. Various lucky places in the north have several close by, whereas before 1989 there were no National Parks within 125 miles of London.
The latest additions help considerably, so for example the South Downs National Park is only 35 miles from central London. But there is still a whopping Park-less gap in the south Midlands, a heck of a long drive from any of the designated fifteen. I thought I'd have a go at working out where the most distant point was so I made a map and drew some lines and I reckon it's the village of Pertenhall in North Bedfordshire, very close to the border with Cambridgeshire. This is at least 75 miles from any of the UK's National Parks. If you live between Kettering, Huntingdon and Bedford you have very much been recreationally short-changed.
The next tier below National Parks is Areas of Outstanding Beauty, or AONBs for short. England has 35 of these, Wales four, and the Wye Valley straddles the two.
AONBs have a better geographical spread, especially in southern England. The biggest five are the Cotswolds, North Pennines, North Wessex Downs, High Weald and Dorset. One of them (the Kent Downs) nudges fractionally into Greater London, indeed AONBs are much more accessible from the capital. But again there's a substantial AONB desert in the East Midlands, very much overlapping with the National Park desert, so I got my map out again to try to identify the location furthest from a National Park or AONB. This time I reckon it's on the outskirts of Oakham in Rutland, a full 45 miles from the Peak District, Cannock Chase, Lincolnshire Wolds and Norfolk Coast. Rutland's hardly scenically desolate, but if you fancy a day out to a government-recognised scenic landscape you face quite a journey.
Now let's bring things up-to-date. Yesterday's Daily Telegraph featured the front page story "Chilterns and Cotswolds to be National Parks", which is just the kind of thing to jolt its readership awake. That'd be a bold and exciting move, unless you lived in either of them and were hoping to install UPVC windows or build a large out of town estate. It'd also help plug the southern gap, introducing a National Park two miles from the Greater London boundary and even accessible by tube. I've recalculated the point furthest from a National Park if the Chilterns and Cotswolds were introduced, and I reckon it'd be near Boston in Lincolnshire, still 65 miles distant. But I'm running away with all this much too fast, because I strongly suspect the Telegraph's story is unfounded over-speculation.
What the government's actually done is respond to a report on the future of National Landscapes which was published way back in July 2019. It's not even a new response, it was made back in June, and it doesn't mention the Cotswolds at all. It does propose introducing two new AONBs (the Yorkshire Wolds and the Cheshire Sandstone Ridge) and extending two existing AONBs (the Surrey Hills and Chilterns), but no suggestion is made of introducing new National Parks. It may be that the Telegraph has a source aware of higher intentions but the article reads like a gross misunderstanding of what Natural England actually said, indeed it even muddles the fiction of 'National Park Cities' into the mix.
Still, enlarging the Chilterns AONB would be intriguing enough, even if fast-tracking it to National Parkdom must be years off. Alas nobody's yet confirmed what those enlarged boundaries would be. All we have so far is the Chiltern Conservation Board's suggestion that it should be enlarged to cover the whole of the chalk landscape.
This map shows the existing Chilterns AONB in dark green and the semi-proposed extension in light green. It'd surround Luton and Hemel Hempstead and edge considerably closer to Reading, Maidenhead and Watford. But calm yourselves, the light green area is actually nothing more than National Character Area 110.
England has 159 National Character Areas - subdivisions based on a combination of landscape, biodiversity, geodiversity and economic factors, following natural rather than administrative boundaries. London for example includes the wider areas of 81Greater Thames Estuary, 111Northern Thames Basin, 112Inner London, 114Thames Basin Lowlands and 115Thames Valley. Each of these NCAs has its own impressively-detailed profile published as 90-page pdf, and all are freely downloadable. If you have nothing else to do today I highly recommend reading the NCA report on where you live, which you can obtain via a set of maps and listings here.
• The extensively wooded and farmed landscape is underlain by chalk bedrock that rises up from the London Basin to form a north-west facing escarpment offering long views over the adjacent vales.
• Valleys without watercourses, known as dry valleys or ‘coombes’, are periglacial landforms created during the last ice age when frozen ground prevented water percolating into the chalk.
• Woodland cover accounts for 14% of the NCA and makes the Chilterns one of the most wooded lowland landscapes in the country.
• Species strongly associated with the Chilterns include the red kite, pasque flower, stag beetle, Chiltern gentian, shepherd’s needle, chalkhill blue butterfly and native box.
• Timber-frame was the traditional material for most buildings until the 18th century when brick began to be widely used. Brick was often made locally, giving rise to variations of colour and quality.
Don't expect Luton to be fast-tracked into a new National Park any time soon, only an eventual upgrade to certain National Landscapes and how they're managed. But even if you're not lucky enough to have a National Park or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty on your doorstep, your local area is likely to be scenically fascinating enough.
