ABSTRACT
National land use planning in the countryside has parallelled agricultural planning during the twentieth century. Again the 1920s and 1930s and the concern for the effects of the depression provide the main genesis for town and country planning. Pressures for greater access to the open countryside by ordinary people had built up in the 1930s, and with it there had grown a concern to protect special areas which were of high landscape value. The legislative and planning response was the Countryside Act 1968, which transformed the National Parks Commission into a Countryside Commission with responsibility for recreation provision and landscape preservation throughout the countryside and not just within the National Parks. The use of the countryside for recreation and nature conservation by a largely urban population has been a major theme in the development of the English countryside in the second half of the twentieth century.
