ABSTRACT
In an influential book first published in 1970 called New Lives, New Landscapes, Nan Fairbrother presented a refreshingly bold and imaginative picture of how the British countryside could change during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Fairbrother argued that new landscapes would have to be created to suit the new tastes and lifestyles of an industrial bureaucracy, landscapes tailored to the needs of an increasingly affluent, mobile and leisured society. Planners and policy-makers were exhorted to reject the narrow conventions of post-war countryside planning, seizing instead the opportunity to be much more interventionist in the way they set about planning the urban fringe, the farmed landscape and the great expanses of remoter upland countryside in the national parks. The challenge was to translate changes in society into changed environments and to do so with confidence and imagination because
A negative policy of not disturbing the old cannot for long succeed. We must disturb it to survive – on a vast scale and everywhere…. In the period since our landscape was created the changes have been more sweeping than in the thousands of years before, yet the translation of social change into changed environments has still barely started.
(Fairbrother 1970: 14)