Julian Glover | The Spectator columnists & writers

Farmers vs rewilders: can they find their common ground?

Our age isn’t the first to set an English landscape of our dreams against the one which actually exists, or see earning a living from the land as something base and destructive. The tension has always been there between people who work the land and the utopian dreamers for whom every mark of the plough is a scar. Farmers bristle at talk of countryside utopias and rewilding, and passionate wilders can’t see why land managers do things which they think are harmful to the land. Both groups complain about being misunderstood by the other, all the while failing to spot that the much more profound threat to the countryside comes from those who don’t care about what happens to it at all. The National Forest in the Midlands, like the Knepp estate in Sussex, which has become renowned as the birthplace of British rewilding, has come to stand as an icon for the positive possibilities of change.

London’s 598 railways stations have made the capital what it is

I began this book waiting for a diesel train to Derby, under the windy, boxy, flat-roofed bit which one of Sir Norman Foster’s team added to the back end of St Pancras station. At around 7 p.m. on a weekday only a dozen or so people were travelling. In the arcade below — built by the proud Midland Railway, as Christian Wolmar reminds us, to the dimensions of the Burton beer barrels the space was designed to store — shops are being boarded up. No one buys a new wheelie case or jewellery before catching a Eurostar to Paris anymore. Among the many entertaining facts he has assembled, Wolmar calculates that London has 598 railway stations. There are mornings now when it feels as though that is greater than the number of peak-hour passengers across the city.

Long live the National Trust

If the second son of an ageing Marquess decided to dress in a pink bikini, rename himself Madame Frou Frou and hung the family Canaletto sideways in his crumbling Lincolnshire pile while lighting his farts we’d all chortle at the charm of the eccentric English toff. You can get away with almost anything if your lineage is sound. When Deborah Devonshire moved into Chatsworth in the 1950s, she sliced a portrait of General Monck by Peter Lely in half to fit in a lift bringing food up from her new kitchen. Hint at anything as half as crass as this if you run the National Trust and all hell will be unleashed. Things, the critics say, were always better at some undisclosed point before the vulgarians arrived. This summer’s storm is over a proposal to change the way the Trust manages its houses.

Is it too late to save Britain’s ash trees?

Once we wrote poems when we lost our trees. Now we just watch them rot. In 1820 John Clare was moved to mark the end of a single tree he had loved: ‘It hoples Withers droops & dies.’ In 2020, so many English trees are dying that it would take a library of Clares to record the casualties. This year, locked-down in Derbyshire, I have been watching skeletons amid the green, hoping that they will return to life. Almost all have. The last of the great field ashes are only just coming into leaf, scarred by late frosts and drought. A row of oaks I ride by most days has dead leaves that crunch in my fingers when I reach up from my horse. The frost got these too — but beneath the brown there are fresh shoots. Little things like these ease the sadness that hits hard when I think of what is happening to our trees.

The Edition

In defence of liberalism: resisting a new era of intolerance

45 min listen

The Edition

In defence of liberalism: resisting a new era of intolerance

45 min listen

Shropshire

I found the land of lost content last week, west of the Clee Hills in the Shropshire Housman wrote about, but hardly knew. It is deep England, thick with trees, stone-built farms that look like forts and tracks in gullies cut by ancient feet. The villages here have rhythmic names: Bouldon, Peaton and Cockshutford — or simple Heath, where there is now no village at all, only the pure Norman chapel standing in grass with its long old iron key on a hook outside. It was built for a settlement lost at the Black Death. Few sounds here are unnatural: you hear birdsong more than cars or planes. I was riding my horse James, with two friends on Cassie and Rubin, along paths bursting with nettles. We scrambled over streams and slippery red mud on to the Brown Clee Hill by Nordy Bank, where our horses nibbled at turf on Neolithic ramparts.

And in the event of a hung parliament...

David Cameron may have to rely on Nick Clegg to form a majority. But Julian Glover says that a deal should be simple – if they focus on areas where they already agreeIn late 2007 two fresh-faced, privately educated party leaders gave speeches setting out their philosophies. ‘We’ve always been motivated by a strong and instinctive scepticism about the capacity of bureaucratic systems to deliver progress,’ said one. I want ‘a politics of people, not systems, of communities, not bureaucracies; of individual innovation, not administrative intervention,’ said the other. ‘The days of big government solutions – of “the man in Whitehall knows best” – are now coming to an end,’ they could have chorused together.The two men were of course David Cameron and Nick Clegg and they would struggle to remember now which of them said what.

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