Introduction

The world is becoming increasingly urban. Already nine out of ten people in Britain live in towns. By the year 2020, it is expected that nine out of ten people in the rest of the world will do the same. The humdrum pressure of urban living makes human contact with the natural world more important than ever, so our towns and cities need to provide very easy access to relatively wild, green landscapes. For the old, and the very young in particular, wildlife on the doorstep is almost the only wildlife that counts. Ironically, almost all the commitments to habitat management, from central government funding and statutory protection, to practical action by enthusiasts on the ground, is directed towards remote rural landscapes, keeping rare species in protective custody, for the pleasure of the privileged few. If these exclusive habitats are to survive, then they need championing by the urban majority, who in turn must be inspired through familiarity with the wildlife they can see every day of the week.

The land resource

There is a myth that urban landscapes are concrete jungles, paved wall to wall with tarmac – a hostile environment where nature struggles to survive. In fact even the most densely built-up places have abundant open space, and in a typical western town or city, greenspace is in the majority. In Leicester, for example, 25% of the city's land area is occupied by private gardens, and the ‘official’ green open space of sports fields, public parks, school playing fields, hospital and college grounds, road verges and golf courses occupies almost as much again.

Introduction

Reedbed, fen and acid bog habitats are generally part of the succession from open water to woodland, differences between them being due to water chemistry, hydrology, geology and climate. Naturally developing successions of all these habitats have considerable conservation significance. However, in many British reedbeds and fens, lack of management has allowed succession to proceed which has produced large areas of woodland, with relatively small areas of early succession open vegetation communities remaining. Hence conservation management in these habitats now tends to focus on the early successional stages, and generally aims to slow or halt the succession. In contrast, many of the open acid bogs remaining in Britain are relatively stable and often require low levels of management, or even none at all. They are, however, threatened by peat extraction, drainage and invasion or afforestation by exotic conifers.

The three habitats vary widely in the vegetation communities and the associated animals that they support. Management experience for reedbeds, fens and acid bogs is summarised in this chapter.

Reedbed, fens and acid bog communities

Reedbeds

Reedbeds are dominated by Common Reed Phragmites australis. Wheeler (1992) defined a pure reedbed as a stand where the Phragmites cover exceeded 90% and an impure reedbed where the Phragmites cover exceeded 75% but was less than 90%. He considered that any stand of vegetation containing Phragmites in lesser proportion than 75% cover constituted a fen community.

Introduction

The composition and structure of the woodlands we have today have been determined as much by their history of management as by climate and soils. These factors in turn influence how we value each wood for nature conservation and the choice of management strategy and practice. Although the historical perspective has been strongly emphasised in the last 25 years, it is far from new; perhaps the first modern measure in woodland conservation was the protection of the ‘Ancient and Ornamental’ woodlands under the 1877 New Forest Act.

Ancient woods (those which have existed since before 1600) are now recognised as the most important for nature conservation (Spencer & Kirby, 1992). Many comprise modified remnants of Britain's original natural Vegetation and include communities of plants and animals which we suppose they inherited directly from the Atlantic forests and have sustained for millennia on or about their present sites. However, even secondary woodlands have a structural complexity which sets them apart from other vegetation formations and may develop into rich habitats. Whilst ancient woodlands are the priority, woodland managers should also seize every opportunity to diversify secondary woods. In a country which still has only 11% of its land area under trees, most landscapes would be enriched by establishing more woodland.

Whilst there is a good case for setting aside some woods as strictly unmanaged reserves, most woods need to be managed, both to maintain their wildlife and to yield timber and other material products. Our woodland wildlife has been heavily influenced by past management systems – notably coppice and wood-pasture – and we can most surely maintain it by continuing, or by gently adapting, the traditional systems.

Introduction

Land-use changes this century have caused the disappearance of many wildlife habitats in Britain and reduced the distribution of others to mere remnants. At such a time of rapid change, nature reserves have an important role: in retaining viable blocks of important ecosystems or habitats holding natural assemblages of plants and animals; as centres for research, education and public enjoyment; and for demonstrating the importance of conservation and the part played by protected areas in an intensively used countryside. Other chapters in this book give the important management practices which can be employed to enhance the conservation interest of them. However, all these management techniques should be applied within the framework of an appropriate management plan.

Conservation management of a site involves knowing what species and communities are present; understanding the ecology of the site; identifying the broad goals for the site (the objectives); identifying the management needed to achieve them (management prescriptions and work programmes); the means to determine progress towards achieving the objectives and showing that resources of cash, labour and skills are being used efficiently (monitoring prescriptions). The management plan is a convenient mechanism for bringing these elements together while the process of producing and implementing it should ensure that the necessary management is widely approved and carried out in an agreed manner to an agreed time-scale.

Introduction

Western European lowland heathland is a distinctive habitat found on nutrient-poor soils, particularly acidic podsols. Catastrophic losses of heathland have occurred throughout western Europe, through conversion to farmland, afforestation, urban development and succession. Despite large-scale losses of heathland in Britain, estimated at 75% between 1800 and 1983, c. 57 000 ha remain representing about 20% of the European resource (Farrell, 1989). Within Britain the survival of a number of species depends on lowland heathland, for example the Smooth Snake Coronella austriaca, Dartford Warbier Sylvia undata and numerous specialist invertebrates. Other rare species, such as Woodlark Lullula arborea, Nightjar Caprimulgus europaeus and Sand Lizard Lacerta agilis depend heavily on heathland but also breed in other habitats.

Lowland heathland communities

Lowland heathland communities found below 300 m are distinct from upland heather moorland. They are characterised by sandy mineral soils of generally lower nutrient status than moorland peat soils. Although we concentrate on ‘dwarf-shrub’ heathland dominated by heathers, particularly Heather or Ling Calluna vulgaris but also Erica species, and gorse (Ulex species), we also consider heathland habitat dominated by grasses and lichens. The ecological processes and land use practices which created and maintain these grass heath and liehen heath communities are the same as those which created and maintain dwarf-shrub heathland.

In 1946 in his inaugural address at the London School of Economics entitled ‘Applied geography’, L. Dudley Stamp remarked on ‘the almost parallel careers of geography and town planning’. Throughout more than the first half of the period with which this volume is concerned this was literally true, for parallel lines do not meet. Both subjects were slowly developing but by the early thirties neither had reached the stage of being held in great respect by other disciplines, and planners certainly had produced very few publications of general interest. The numbers of professionals in both subjects were few indeed. The Town Planning Institute had been formed in 1913 by architects, engineers and surveyors and its members worked principally in the departments of local government concerned with such matters as roads and drains. It had only a few hundred members by the time the Institute of British Geographers was formed twenty years later with, initially, less than eighty members.

Those latter pioneers were almost exclusively engaged, and very heavily engaged, in university teaching, without the help of technicians. A high proportion of their students expected to become teachers of geography, an increasingly popular subject by then well established in the curriculum of secondary schools. I was such a student.

This collection of essays began as a direct consequence of the work that I undertook on behalf of the Institute of British Geographers to prepare a history of its first fifty years. It was suggested to me that, while I was delving into the development of the subject in 1933, the year in which the Institute was founded, and the years immediately before then, I might also attempt an assessment of the position of geography in Britain between the wars. The idea appealed to me for I had been taught in Oxford by J. N. L. Baker who had always impressed upon me and my fellow students the importance of an appreciation of the history of geography. I subscribed wholly to the view that he had expressed in a lecture on ‘Geography and its history’ given to Section E (Geography) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1955 (Baker 1955:198):

To understand the progress of geography in Britain between 1918 and 1945 it is important to appreciate what was the state of the subject at the beginning and at the end of the period under review. However ‘new’ geography may sometime seem to us in the twentieth century, certainly as a university discipline, it is a subject with a long and honourable history. Its evolution over the centuries has been studied by many writers, both in general terms and in detail, and it is unnecessary to repeat this story even in summary form. Perhaps it is enough to remind ourselves that geography has long been known and practised in Britain. We know, for example, that as long ago as 1187, Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welsh scholar in Oxford, read aloud his Topography of Ireland for three whole days in 1187. Nearly four hundred years later, and again in Oxford, Richard Hakluyt, a Student of Christ Church, gave lectures on geography and subsequently produced the series of volumes called The Principall navigations, voyages and discoveries of the English nation. Indeed the view of J. N. L. Baker is that the progress of academic geography in Britain during ‘the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is largely concerned with the University of Oxford which during that period led the way in geographical study and accomplishment, and produced one work of outstanding merit’ (Nathanael Carpenter's Geographie Delineated Forth in Two Bookes, containing the Sphaericall and Topicall Parts thereof, published in Oxford in 1625).

I am not sure when the term ‘historical geography’ was first used. One early example comes from 1834 when it appeared in the phrase ‘historical or political geography’ in the article on geography in the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Another early example is dated 1846 when it entered into the title of Karl von Spruner's pioneer historical atlas. In this context it implied concern with changes in political boundaries and with the varying extent of states and provinces; and this usage has continued among some people up to the present day. It also formed part of the titles of a number of books in the 1840s which were very largely historical topographies.

Before the end of the century the term was also used to indicate concern with the influence of geography upon history. That it became increasingly frequent may be gathered from the fact that in 1873 H. F. Tozer (himself a classical geographer) could say that A. P. Stanley had ‘done more than any living man to promote the intelligent study of historical geography’; his most notable contribution was a volume on Sinai and Palestine (1856), which sought to trace the relations between the geography of the area and the history of its people. Stanley acknowledged the help of ‘Mr Grove, of Sydenham’ in Kent, who later contributed many geographical articles to William Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (1860–5).

What was meant by physical geography? In the years following 1918 most people probably included in their answer what was in the then standard book on the subject, Physical Geography, by Philip Lake, which was first published in 1915. It was in three sections – elementary meteorology and climatology, oceanography and landforms. It was finally printed in 1958, having been considerably enlarged and in part re-written. Nevertheless, for about half a century it was used both for first-year work at universities and for sixth-form work in schools. But during that time the subject had expanded greatly, and in the 1930s several more specialist books were written and were in general use. But advanced courses in physiography or geomorphology could not be attempted without the reading of many papers, largely, but not wholly, on fieldwork and research into the origin of landforms and related matters. These appeared in scientific journals, mainly of geology and geography. Although some courses still required a knowledge of climate and meteorology and possibly of oceanography, these subjects at an advanced level were basically the field of physicists, chemists and biologists. I have stressed advanced level; a general knowledge of both oceanography and climatology with meteorology was doubtless taught in several departments, and at Cambridge, until recent changes, reasonably detailed lectures were given in both subjects.

To the majority of contemporary geographers, the contribution of the years covered by this book will seem little more than, at best, an historical footnote to the infinitely more voluminous and relevant material of the succeeding four decades. For the undergraduate in particular, the concepts and the names which have surfaced will have scant significance save as grist for the mill in the historical sections of the near ubiquitous ‘principles’ or ‘general’ paper. Even then, it is depressingly rare for the work quoted to have been read in original form rather than in abstract in a later commentary. Indeed, one of the most respected of those commentaries (Johnston 1983) itself takes 1945 as its initial point of reference.

Those years, however, have far more than antiquarian value, as the most cursory reading of the chapters of this volume bears witness. They laid the effective foundations of university teaching in the discipline, spanning its emergence as an honours degree subject in its own right to its acceptance as a core subject in any credible university curriculum. They nourished a conceptual and intellectual framework which still has relevance despite the ferment and the fruits of more recent years. They nurtured a fellowship in which personal relationships had a significance beyond academic intercourse, and gave geography a fervour and freshness which underpinned its intellectual attractions, and which happily in large measure it still retains.

Alfred Steers has documented the expansion of departments of geography, and of teaching in physical geography within them, before 1945. It is clear from his survey that in research, if not in teaching, ‘physical geography’ meant geomorphology: for while some attention was given to meteorology, climatology, and to some extent pedology and biogeography, it was on the level of elementary service courses for students rather than as a contribution to new knowledge.

What was the intellectual context within which these developments took place? To what extent were the academic achievements of the new physical geography constrained by the slow and scattered nature of its institutional development? What was the attitude of the geologists, throughout the nineteenth century the natural custodians of landform studies, to these activities, and how did the physical geographers respond?

The relationship of geographers with the geologists was a critical one, in various ways and on a variety of levels. When geography first became established at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1880s, geologists were less than enthusiastic: indeed D. W. Freshfield called them ‘the most forward of the would-be “chuckers-out” of geography from the Hall of Education’ (Freshfield 1886: 704). Geology itself was becoming increasingly specialized, and saw much of physical geography as elementary background material with which it was properly concerned, while the study of landforms, scarcely then dignified as a distinct and autonomous field of knowledge, was an indispensable adjunct to their own reconstructions of recent geological history.

Geography was taught at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, from the days when the College first opened its doors in 1872 – that is, forty-six years before a University Department providing first degree courses with Honours in the subject was established in 1918. All that was given were lectures similar in content to ‘the use of the globe’, a recital of the names of the chief mountains, the capes and bays and principal rivers, followed by the largest towns of a selected country, and ending with the imports and exports of the country concerned. This represented little more than the content of the geography syllabus found in any primary school in Britain in Victorian times. The lecturers who dealt with the subject had little or no geographical background and took on the task of instruction as a mere ‘odd job’ imposed upon them by the Principal. Many of them, however, were well qualified in their own special fields to give lectures on geography, as, for example, the first member of staff, Reverend W. Hoskins Abrall. He was a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and became the first Professor of Classics at Aberystwyth, retaining at the same time his post as vicar of a Herefordshire parish. There were some, however, who gave lectures in geography and geology in the early days who had a wider background as, for example, Leonard Lyell, nephew of the distinguished geologist, Sir Charles Lyell.

‘Far be it from me,’ wrote H. J. Fleure in 1916, ‘to think of suggesting an Act of Uniformity as regards geographical method … the adaptability of the subject to the teacher's talents and opportunities is greater than that of most subjects …’ (Fleure 1915–16). He was writing at a time when education in general, and university education in particular, was apparently static through the misery of war but was about to experience a vast expansion, especially in secondary schools and universities. For all this the foundation had been laid in the new grammar schools and in the small departments of geography and other supposedly ‘new’ subjects. The advance was to come when Honours courses were provided, of which the first was at Liverpool in 1917 in the Arts faculty, followed a year later at Aberystwyth, in geography and anthropology, in both the Arts and Science faculties, and also in London in 1918, and by Cambridge and Leeds in 1919. No directive was given from government or from any national organization of geographers on the content of courses, so it is hardly surprising that they were largely a reflection of the views and tastes of the geographers who had become heads of departments, mostly working with one or two junior colleagues whose work in some cases was supplemented by courses given in other departments such as physical geography by geologists or the history of ancient geography by classical scholars.

For all but one of the years 1918–45, the geography department at Birkbeck College was ‘guided’ successively by J. F. Unstead and Eva G. R. Taylor. Unstead was appointed lecturer in geography at Birkbeck College in 1909 following George G. Chisholm (at Birkbeck, 1895–1908) and L. W. Lyde (at Birkbeck, 1908–09); the latter lectured at Birkbeck in a part-time capacity while also occupying the chair of geography at University College London, to which he had been appointed in 1903. Shortly after Birkbeck College became a constituent school of the University of London in 1920, Unstead was appointed to the newly created chair of geography tenable at the College. Ten years later, at the early age of fifty-five, he resigned from his post ‘in order’, he has gone on record as saying, ‘to read and think, to travel and write’. He was succeeded by Dr Eva Taylor who was appointed to the chair in open competition. She had studied in Oxford under A. J. Herbertson between 1906 and 1908 for the Certificate of Regional Geography and the Diploma of Geography, both of which she obtained with marks of distinction. She also served from 1908–10 as a research assistant to Herbertson. She used to compile and draw his wall maps for schools and was paid privately by him. She first joined the staff of Birkbeck College in 1921, having previously lectured in a part-time capacity at East London College, later Queen Mary College.

The role of individual departments of geography, notably in the years immediately after the First World War, is outlined in several of the essays in this volume. The special position of Cambridge has been emphasized by more than one writer, and the importance of the University of London – with its close relationships with university colleges in a number of places, including Exeter, Hull, Leicester, Nottingham, Reading and Southampton – will have been made obvious in other essays. The School of Geography in Oxford, with which the writer was associated from 1934 as an undergraduate and later as a member of staff until 1956, also made very significant contributions to the development of the subject in the inter-war period. The geographical tradition in Oxford is indeed as old in Oxford as in any other British university. The history of geography in Oxford has been described by, among other people, J. N. L. Baker (1963), E. W. Gilbert (1972) and D. I. Scargill (1976), and it is, therefore, unnecessary even to summarize it here. An appropriate starting point is the establishment in 1887 of the Readership in Geography held by H. J. (later Sir Halford) Mackinder. This was made possible by the generosity of the Royal Geographical Society which provided money for the appointment, largely as a result of the publication of the Scott Keltie Report on ‘Geography in Education’ in 1886 (Gilbert 1972; Scargill 1976). H. J. Mackinder was elected the first Reader.