Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), pp. 251–282

The New Forest, once the hunting preserve of English monarchs, owes its distinctive landscape to stock-keeping and timber production. It avoided enclosure in the eighteenth century and again in the 1870s, benefiting from the new public perception of the need to conserve open spaces. Although subsequently treasured as ‘a national park’, it was not until the 1920s that an outcry over the felling of ‘ancient and ornamental woodland’ triggered calls for it to be given legal protection and spurred government to consider the case for national parks generally. In the 1940s, however, it was accepted that the Forest was ‘in good hands’ so it was not among the candidates for national park designation recommended by the Hobhouse Committee (1947). Plans drawn up in the 1950s for giving it status as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty were abandoned. It was not until the late 1980s that calls for national park status began to be debated seriously but in 1994 these too were dropped. Designation of the New Forest National Park was finally confirmed in 2004. 

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