WALKING THIS WAY? K
eswick. 2084. I turn off the iEye feeding the morning’s news directly into my retina and recline with a sigh into one of the big fl oating aircouches in Costa Coffee. Tourists bustle around the counter fi ddling with sugar sachets, holiday- home owners sit reading the Daily Mail and oil oligarchs’ assistants buy skinny lattes for their bosses in advance of a hard day’s property speculation.
A pair of Chinese tourists are hovering jealously around my couch. Literally, using hoverboots. I knock back the dregs of my coffee and let them take it, then walk outside into the stifl ing, hot air. The streets are packed with day-trippers arriving from London on the newly- opened HS3 line, though there are fewer than there might be because the line bores directly through Dove Cottage and most of Grasmere. Video billboards in the streets advertise mountain-top rollercoasters and family discounts on badger hunts. Fracking tremors rumble under my feet as I walk through the streets to the edge of town, passing silent second homes and eventually joining what used to resemble a path up Latrigg, hacking upwards through fi elds of bracken. My iEye blinks adverts for mountain rescue insurance. I head on up Skiddaw, reach the summit, and look around at the landscape. It’s a hazy, humid day. The sky is criss-crossed with aeroplane contrails. People on zip wires stream down distant fellsides and the tops are dotted with derelict wind turbines and 9G communication masts built by Huawei after the National Parks were sold to a cabal of multinationals at a knock-down price. The ocean glimmers taut and still beyond the now-seaside town of Cockermouth. The Lake District is busier than ever since most of England disappeared underwater. A raven appears next to me. It opens its mouth and, instead of its characteristic croaking call, emits a harsh beeping sound… I wake up with a jolt to the sound of my alarm. Relief comes as I gradually adjust back to reality. But for the rest of the morning the vision of a crassly exploited Lake District simmers troublingly beneath the surface. Surely a National Park would never become the subject of so much industrial and commercial exploitation? National Parks are protected, aren’t they? Wouldn’t there be outrage and anger before it ever got that bad? Worryingly, it seems perhaps not. Later that day, I read the government was attempting
to lift planning regulations to allow unused agricultural buildings such as barns to be turned into houses without planning permission, with no exemptions for national parks or other protected landscapes. The Dales has an estimated 4,000 barns sitting alone
in fi elds and upland pastures. Some dating back as far as the eighteenth century, they are as integral to the landscape as rust-coloured rivers, limestone pavement, dry stone walls, the Ribblehead Viaduct, chocolate box villages, Cistercian abbeys, mining relics and desolate moorland. Imagine the impact on places like Swaledale and Wensleydale if only a fraction were converted into houses. Peter Charlesworth, chair of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, spelled it out: “Valleys full of fi elds dotted with these stone fi eld barns could be transformed into a semi-urban environment with roads and overhead power and phone lines. You would have gardens, cars, washing lines, greenhouses and everything else that goes with a home springing up in some of the most stunning and nationally protected countryside in England.” After a chorus of opposition from park chiefs, politicians and the public, the government eventually conceded that parks and AONBs should be exempt from the new changes. But we’d be wrong to relax. While this threat may have been headed off, it was not an isolated occurrence. This government has made no secret of its determination to, in its euphemistic language, ‘simplify’ the planning system when it comes to the countryside. Restrictions on building on green belt and Areas of Outstanding National Beauty have been loosened and developers have been given the power to push through applications without the need for council approval or environmental assessments. The pain has already been felt. Nadhim Zahawi, a senior adviser to the Prime Minister, said in January that the "physical harm" being infl icted on the countryside by the Coalition's planning reforms could become "the defi ning legacy of this government." National Parks, already hobbled by millions worth of budget cuts, are not exempt from this anti-planning zeal. Planning minister Nick Boles has openly stated his determination to encourage more development in National Parks. In this context, the barn conversion changes take on a wider signifi cance than a few old buildings getting the Grand Designs treatment; by enfeebling the role of National Parks in planning, they strike at their ability to perform their founding function, which is to balance the competing demands of
It isn’t hard to predict the impact on the tourist
economy if the very thing tourists come to experience – the landscape – is defi led.
SUMMIT#73 | SPRING 2014 | 79
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