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The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future

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We live in a world where the drive for economic growth is crowding out everything that can’t be given a monetary value. We’re stuck on a treadmill where only the material things in life gain traction and it’s getting harder to find space for the things that really matter but money can’t buy, including our future.

Fiona Reynolds proposes a solution that is at once radical and simple – to inspire us through the beauty of the world around us. Delving into our past, examining landscapes, nature, farming and urbanisation, she shows how ideas about beauty have arisen and evolved, been shaped by public policy, been knocked back and inched forward until they arrived lost in the economically-driven spirit of today. A passionate, polemical call to arms, The Fight for Beauty presents an alternative path one that, if adopted, could take us all to a better future.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2016

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About the author

Fiona Reynolds

11 books3 followers
Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE is Master of Emmanuele College, Cambridge.
She came to the College from the National Trust, of which she has been Director-General since 2001. Her appointment there ceased at the end of 2012. Before her position with the Trust, she was Director of the Women’s Unit in the Cabinet Office and was previously Director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (now Campaign to Protect Rural England) and Secretary to the Council for National Parks.

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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for william bruce.
9 reviews4 followers
August 11, 2017
First of all this book has opened my eyes to the present and the future, especially in relation to my daughter's future. The book has made a huge impact on how I feel about beauty. - rural or urban. The book was well written, although I did feel myself getting a little lost with all the factual stuff - reports, Acts of Parliament etc, which I would say did interrupt my reading flow slightly.
The book has ignited an interest on this subject, surprisingly as I only bought this book as it was on sale!...A great find 😀
Profile Image for Joseph Oddy.
21 reviews
September 5, 2025
Some good discussion about the importance of beauty, but very focused on specifics (e.g. planning, UK focus)
Profile Image for Mark Avery.
74 reviews95 followers
September 6, 2016
I opened this book with some trepidation because I wanted to like it and wasn’t sure that I would: I needn’t have worried. This book gives a thorough and somewhat engaging account of the protection of landscape beauty in the UK and is written by someone who has played a major and positive part in the progress that has been made over the last 30 years.

Dame Fiona Reynolds worked in the Campaign for National Parks and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England before a spell in the Cabinet Office of the Blair government, and became Director General of the National Trust in 2001 – a post she occupied for 11 years during which the organisation shook off some of its stuffiness and massively increased its membership to the envy of all other countryside and environmental NGOs. Running the National Trust would normally be seen as a pinnacle of achievement but Fiona is now Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

The author’s background and expertise is displayed to good effect in chapters that recount the rise of landscape appreciation and the National Trust, the evolution of National Parks (including an account of the Kinder Scout mass trespass), the planning system, nature conservation, farming, forestry, the coast etc. Fiona has personally played a major part in these matters through her employment roles but also through cropping up on numerous committees to look at things such as public ownership of forestry and the future of farming. This book gives insights into how things happened and why they happened and there are relatively few people who could write of such things with such knowledge and personal involvement.

I find the book strong on historical account and personal insight but weak on analysis. Perhaps not surprisingly there is no definition of beauty in these pages – we get into the account assuming that there is such a thing as beauty and that we all more or less share that same view. This is to some extent true, but to a large extent false. I remember, decades ago, being a voluntary warden in my school summer holidays at the glorious RSPB nature reserve at Arne and looking across the lowland heathland towards Corfe Castle and thinking what a wonderful view and how privileged I was to be there when, at that very moment of feeling warm and fuzzy about rural beauty, another visitor spoke the words ‘What a terrible wasteland this is. It ought to be put to some good use.’ and the moment was lost. And we all (or maybe not all of us) have had the experience of looking at the Lake District and being told how beautiful it is and thinking quietly to oneself, ‘Yes, but it’s so ecologically knackered! It’s geology without the biology.’. Or is that just me?

No two people find the same film stars beautiful, the same music beautiful, or the same paintings beautiful so perhaps it is unsurprising that we might not find the same landscapes beautiful. But this book doesn’t, rather understandably, deal very much with that issue. It’s a tricky one because it means that all that work to protect beauty might be protecting only one version of beauty and perhaps the wrong type of beauty, if such a thing can exist. This issue will have been familiar to Fiona when the National Trust bought properties and she recounts her hurt at a critical newspaper headline when the NT bought a bunch of Birmingham back-to-back houses.

And then there is the matter of nature. To what extent is a place beautiful if it has lost much of its wildlife – like the Lake District? Does a sweeping landscape with inspiring peaks still count as beautiful if standing in it there is little birdsong and no summer hum of insects? If visitors to much of the British uplands were told, perhaps by the National Trust. ‘Yes it looks pretty but it’s an ecological desert, you know’ would we act in the same way in future? Wildlife gets plenty of mentions in this book, but often bundled up with lots of other things as though if you sort out protecting the landscape, work with local people, talk to the stakeholders then all that nature stuff will surely be OK – all we know suggests not. There is little of this tension in this book. No matter – the book will probably bring these thoughts to the fore in many readers’ minds as it did in mine.

And if one isn’t completely sure of what type of beauty one is trying to protect then it’s difficult to know whether one wants or loathes rewilding. This hot topic is largely skirted in the book too. Will beauty, whatever it is, be enhanced by keeping things as they are or perhaps by changing them radically? Another tricky issue.

Recently, on a glorious spring day, I drove across the edge of Rannoch Moor and down Glencoe. The sun was shining and the mountain scenery was inspiring. As you pass by some lochs you might notice, I wonder how many do, the strong growth of trees on the islands in those water bodies and the almost complete absence of trees in the rest of the landscape. This land is heavily grazed by cattle in the distant past, sheep and deer nowadays. How should we feel about the beauty of this landscape? If we reduced the grazing pressure then in 50 years the road would be enclosed by many more trees and scrub and the view would be…more or less beautiful? Further down the road in Glencoe the scenery was impressive but the hills are gaunt and bare. Here and there you catch a glimpse of a half-forested hillside – a straight line of a forestry plantation cuts across the hill. That sight shows that the natural (whatever that is) tree line would dictate that all these mountains would be largely tree-covered but they are not. We are looking at the skeleton of the landscape, and it has a harsh beauty, but it is a landscape stripped of life, and knowing that can we find it truly beautiful? Does this landscape need covering up with some more forests? Would that enhance or detract from its beauty?

The subtitle of the book, ‘Our path to a better future’ is a bit hopeful, I think. The author, as have others, asks us to embrace the concept of beauty as being necessary and essential for human happiness and that we should pay it more attention. And so we should. How is that going to happen I wonder when economic greed seems to rule the world and we don’t, quite, have an agreement on what beauty is or how deep it should be? Fiona accentuates the positive in her book and the sub-title could have been ‘It could have been so much worse’ or ‘The path from a better past’.

But the future is always up for grabs. Those of us who care will have to fight to keep beauty in the world, and I find it interesting that Fiona chose the word ‘Fighting’ for her book as I did for mine (Fighting for Birds) but it’s entirely appropriate as Fiona is a fighter, and that comes across here. She and I have been fighting for slightly different things through our lives but the overlap has usually been big and sometimes been complete. We are basically on the same side though, as you can perhaps tell, I feel that Fiona’s real appreciation of nature is less well developed than my own.

I did enjoy this book very much indeed. The accounts of past events are clear and interesting and I learned a lot. It also made me think, and that’s always good in a book. I strongly recommend it as a very good read.

There are some awful black and white photographs in the book – try and tell me what is on p80 without reading the caption. This isn’t very clever in a book about beauty and landscapes. Fiona’s writing is very clear, the photographs scattered through the text are very obscure and many look like they were taken in fog. The colour photographs in the centre are much better, though some are too small and have too large captions – fewer larger images would have been better, more beautiful!

This review first appeared on my blog on 29 May 2016 http://markavery.info/2016/05/29/sund...
Profile Image for Ian Russell.
267 reviews6 followers
August 14, 2016
The Fight for Beauty is more about the Fight than the Beauty. In essence, it is a political history of the organisations on whose executive boards the author worked; the National Trust and CPRE (Campaign for the Protection of Rural England), along with other similar bodies.

I came upon this book with high expectations being an ex-townie who, some years ago now, chose deliberately to move to the countryside for some of the very reasons posited in the book: a love of rural, open spaces and nature. You could say I was happily ensconced in this choir, eager to hear the inspirational sermon, and leave with a strong heart and good thoughts. I suppose I was wanting deep insights into what Beauty means to everyone, a philosophical discourse possibly backed up with interesting research, presented in an engaging way. Sadly, I found it impossible to engage with.

The book comprises a series of essays on different aspects or ideas pertaining to the work of preserving and protecting certain totemic subjects in Britain: the landscape, especially open, wilder places but also agricultural landscape; the woods and forests; the coastline; ancient monuments and historic houses; and lastly, though it may seem like mission creep, the urban environment. For me, each of these essays fails to get off the ground. They are too much like over long Wiki articles, or those dreary, emotionless corporate reports (of which I've had a hand in myself, sorry to say) which can only ever interest those with skin in the game, if at all. When they show promise, a good beginning or a diversion into an intriguing anecdote - it shortly returns to a sequence of bald facts, stats, dates, names - this brought to mind Rudge's pithy remark in Alan Bennett's History Boys, "[History], it's just one fuckin' thing after another" - and proxy quotes and truisms. Too much of the time, an unrewarding slog. Also there is a conspicuous absence of dealing with errors and failings. Failings are just seen as a lost fight, never an organisation's mistake. Surely, organisations as large as these are not without controversy. They balls up, it's natural. How is a history complete and honest without humility in contemplating true failings?

Beauty doesn't get enough of a look in, I felt. It's one third of a grand title, so it should. And it disappoints me that a book supposedly on beauty should have such awful illustrations accompanying it throughout. Smudgy, grey thumbnails which, in the ebook, only get more illegible with enlargement. (I've since read a review which describes those in the paper version as also being poor.) The technology of the ebook though can, and should, offer better illustrations and images. Furthermore, much of the other extra, beneficial tech which is thankfully becoming standard on ebooks - hyperlinks, cross-referencing, background information, interaction and Kindle's so-called "x-ray" facility - have been disabled here. There is an odd collection of colour photos at the back which are only slightly better quality but slightly less context, hence their relegation to the back, presumably. With imagination and a contemporary flair for such things, it could have been so much better presented.

Thankfully, there is a fairly good index so anyone wanting to look up a particular point in future might do so easily. Lastly, the author's acknowledgments begin with the line, "They say everyone has a book in them, and this is mine." It's not, I think, an apology. In context, the saying doesn't allow, leat of all encourage, everyone to go off and write their book, it merely suggests that everyone has a life of some interest and significance. Whereas writing is a talent and skill uncommon in most of us. It's why I tend to steer clear of autobiographies.

As a little footnote and fwiw, I found this especially difficult to write. I don't enjoy submitting the first negative review, and it's worse when it's the very first review listed! I saw Amazon has a straight nine, full five star reviews. I can't fathom what they all found that I missed. I even reread some randomly selected passages to see if it was different the second time.
Thankfully, being nobody, no one is going to take this review seriously. Or others may come along and agree, and then I will feel vindicated. Ha, ha. Or should I do it at all? I'm getting no obvious reward for it. What a funny informational technological world we live in.



Profile Image for Fazeena Hisham Azhar.
6 reviews1 follower
May 10, 2024
I found the title incredibly misleading.
There were detailed educational moments, especially on the country homes, green belts, coastlines and urbanisation but overall I found the historical British context out of touch with the global context of the times mentioned. It only narrates Great Britain itself, what about the British Empire. For example, there was much beauty in colonized places that was wiped out by the British. Would it not be prudent and relevant to mention a chapter in that as well rather than the lengthy texts on the countryside dating pre 1700s. If one is going to mention British history we certainly must mention all of it even the ‘ugly’ parts (pun intended), what of the native buildings and nature in many parts of the world that were intentionally destroyed in a quest for British world domination.
Furthermore, much of the derelict urban areas are concentrated by minorities. It would have been appreciated to show their presence and inclusion in ‘beauty’ mentioned and the diverse cultural heritage they bring to the physical urban landscape.
At one point in the book, graffiti was suggested as something that should not be on buildings or structures. However, notable artists like Banksy are part of the beauty of street art.
A white-washed British focused novel, where the last chapter states that many other countries have a ‘homogenous scenery.’ I beg to differ in that regard (please note publisher: China and USA have one of the most diverse landscapes in the world. Also Africa is a continent not one country-and I’m sure most would agree far more diverse than Great Britain).
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and a level of introspection is required especially if the author chooses to reach a larger readership; this book would do well to recall that.
However, condensing a large magnitude of information into a readable and palatable format is no small feat and requires a great deal of diligence and the author’s personal work in the field of national conservation and planning is certainly commendable.
Profile Image for Helen.
1,279 reviews25 followers
February 6, 2017
Enjoyed this comprehensive look at the various organisations involved in conservation of both the built and the natural environment in Britain. I got a little bit bogged down in all the acronyms and name changes and mergers of the various bodies, but that goes with the territory, I think. (Thank goodness the National trust hasn't done this!)
Lots of food for thought, and worry, here.
[One or two minor quibbles: I think she has accepted a bit too readily the view that hut circles on Dartmoor are all farming-related (might be, but there is another theory concerning the tin trade which has some recent evidence to back it up); the "brownfield first" policy is great, but we're now beginning to see perfectly good Victorian buildings being demolished, or being allowed to decay beyond the point of repair, in order to create brownfield sites for development (at least we are where I live), which perhaps hadn't been foreseen].
This is a very good, readable, personal view from someone who has been heavily involved in the movements and issued covered for many years. Recommended!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

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