Letter to Kent

As we begin our centenary year, we’re sending this message to everyone: love your countryside and be part of its future. This is just the beginning – and we all have a part to play in shaping what comes next. If you share this vision, join the movement today, add your name to this letter and stand with us.

Dear Kent,

The countryside is your greatest achievement. A beautiful masterpiece built by centuries of collaboration between people and nature. From meadows and woodlands to rivers, coasts and the green spaces that bind us together, the countryside connects and sustains us all.

For a century, the Campaign to Protect Rural England has been its guardian. Despite the relentless, growing pressure on our landscapes, we’ve stood up for the countryside and helped give the people who love it a voice. That will never change.

Many of the pressures facing our countryside today were familiar to our founders – not least the challenge of providing homes, infrastructure and prosperity on a small island. But new pressures have emerged with more catastrophic impacts on the land we love. Nature is in freefall and climate change threatens to alter our landscapes for good.

Now more than ever, decisions about how we use our land are leading to the needless loss of landscapes and everything they support. Without drastic action, much of what makes our countryside unique and beautiful will be lost.

Wherever we live, we rely on the countryside for clean air, home-grown food, thriving wildlife and resilience in the face of climate change. Yet these foundations are being chipped away.

Too often decisions are shaped by profit, not what’s needed most – and the countryside pays the price.

Few, if any, counties have suffered the onslaught of development as much as Kent. From eye-wateringly high levels of housebuilding, little of which benefits local people, to sprawling transport infrastructure such as lorry parks, to energy projects (increasingly under the guise of ‘green energy’) that trash the countryside, our county is facing destructive change of a grimly depressing magnitude.

To cite just a couple of examples, the renowned landscape of Romney Marsh – the ‘Fifth Continent’ – faces devastation from a range of vast solar farms that would change it beyond recognition, while in the east of the county a huge area of wildlife-rich countryside, including a National Nature Reserve, is threatened by National Grid’s Sea Link scheme, which includes a converter station, a battery-storage plant and yet more pylons. As so often, green energy is anything but green.

Our centenary vision is for a countryside that’s greener, more resilient and protected for future generations.

There is a better way – one we’re calling for, and one everyone can be part of:

• Stop the loss of countryside. Let’s protect what we love and do everything we can to make sure green fields and woodlands aren’t needlessly lost.
• Improve the quality of the countryside for future generations. That means thriving communities, clean rivers, healthy food and resilient landscapes rich in nature.
• Inspire more people to care for the countryside. A countryside for all where more people take action to enjoy and protect it.

Thankfully, Kent is blessed in having a range of people and organisations working hard to protect and enhance our countryside – an example is Chalk to Coast, a vision for a nature corridor linking the chalk downs of north Kent with the Thames estuary, with the wider view of restoring wildlife at scale.

We are working with other groups and volunteers across Kent as part of CPRE’s Hedgerow Heroes project in planting some four kilometres of hedgerow at 19 sites – that’s almost 18,000 trees, great news for wildlife and great news for our landscape.

We’re focused on the beauty of the Kent countryside and its wildlife, but people are at the core of what we do. We want to see housing built in the right places helping local people to live in their own homes in their own communities, while we campaign strongly for solar panels on rooftops – sparing the countryside and delivering energy that we can all justifiably call green. And we all know people need attractive places in which to spend their spare time – we are of course talking about the countryside!

As we begin our centenary year, we’re sending this message to everyone: love your countryside and be part of its future. This is just the beginning – and we all have a part to play in shaping what comes next.

If you share this vision, join the movement today, add your name to this letter and stand with us.

• Sign the letter here