On a spring day in 1932, 400 walkers from Manchester and Sheffield gathered on the plateau of Kinder Scout, braced for confrontation.
Published 21st Oct 2026, 07:32 BST
They were committing an act of mass trespass as part of a campaign to secure universal access to Britain's wild spaces. At the time, most of the countryside was off-limits to everyone except the wealthy. Gamekeepers aggressively policed Britain’s vast private estates because their masters didn't welcome unauthorised boots on grouse moors. As the travel writer Simon Parker recounts in his excellent book, The Wild Road Home, this act of defiance on Kinder Scout acted as a rallying cry for a movement which helped to establish Britain’s national park system, built around the belief that the working man - and woman - had just as much right to enjoy our stunning natural landscape as their affluent neighbours. The mass trespass in 1932 led to arrests and clashes with gamekeepers. Defending himself in court, one of the protesters said: “We ramblers, after a hard week’s work, in smoky towns and cities, go out rambling for..fresh air. And we find the finest rambling country is closed to us.”
The public outcry that followed was largely in favour of the protesters. Today, they would almost certainly have welcomed the fact that Britain has 15 national parks, which shows their activism achieved its goal. But can living and working inside a 21st century national park be something of a poisoned chalice?
This concern came to the fore when I interviewed Simon Parker on stage at the Ilkley Literature Festival. As preparation for writing his latest book, he had cycled and walked through each of the UK’s national parks, an experience he found idyllic but sometimes enraging. He concludes that the national parks are, in fact, confused places, facing competing demands from a wide range of stakeholders. Perhaps, he argues, this island is too small for national parks in the first place? By retrofitting them around human conurbations in a densely populated country, are we asking for trouble? He was most worried about the depleted natural landscape with so-called protected lands suffering from an alarming lack of wildlife.
What particularly struck me was the brutal fact that it’s extremely hard to visit the national parks if you don’t own a car, which excludes large numbers of people on modest incomes. The Kinder Scout rebels included factory workers who would almost certainly have relied on buses and trains which are hard to find in large parts of our national parks today. As Simon says in his book, despite their working class roots, born out of an urge to escape polluted towns and cities, the national park system is mainly used by the white middle class who own a car. There is official evidence to support this argument. Government data reveals that white people working in “higher and intermediate managerial jobs” are the most likely group to visit the natural environment (at 54.7 per cent); while semi and unskilled manual workers from other ethnic groups are the least likely to venture into the great outdoors (at 22.6 per cent). Almost a century after that gallant stand on Kinder Scout, there is still work to be done to ensure our landscape is welcoming to all.
Greg Wright is the deputy business editor of The Yorkshire Post