Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 125

Susanna Wade Martins’ study offers a valuable account of a county conservation movement. Conservation in Norfolk, as elsewhere, responded to wider social and environmental changes, but the county was notable for institutional innovations such as the establishment of the first county nature trust, the Norfolk Naturalists Trust, founded in 1926. Wade Martins documents the key organizations and individuals fostering a conservationist outlook, whether in terms of nature, amenity, archaeology or the built environment, setting the county story within a broader narrative of changing social attitudes and policy priorities. It is good to have a work covering conservation in the county as a whole, to set alongside accounts concentrating on specific regions such as the Broads, as in Tom Williamson’s The Norfolk Broads (1997) or my own In the nature of landscape: cultural geography on the Norfolk Broads (2014), where many of the key figures in Wade Martins’ story also appear. The fine illustrations throughout make The conservation movement in Norfolk an attractive book for a general and academic readership.

Five chapters of varied length tell a largely chronological story. The first chapter shows the conservation movement emerging in the nineteenth century through bodies such as the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society (established 1846) and the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists’ Society (1869). Botany, ornithology and antiquarianism shape new forms of county appreciation, with middle-class interest prompted in part by touristic encounters with county environments in key areas such as the coast and Broads. The second chapter traces the relationship between organizations working at county level and the beginnings of national legislation on nature protection and historic monuments, Wade Martins moving her account between the local and national scales. Chapter 3 considers the interwar period, where Norfolk was notable for the emergence of conservation bodies set up to purchase and manage land, the Norfolk Naturalists Trust and the Norfolk Archaeological Trust (established 1923) working alongside the existing county scientific societies, with some overlap of personnel, for example in the key figure of naturalist Sydney Long. The Norfolk operations of national organizations such as the National Trust, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the state’s Office of Works are also traced. The fourth chapter gives a briefer account of the immediate post-war years, with the expansion of conservation landholdings and the implementation of national planning legislation concerning nature and historic buildings. Wade Martins presents the post-war decades as marking a shift from a concern for the preservation of specific sites to the conservation of the wider environment, and her final chapter follows this through to the present day. Here agriculture becomes a key theme, with stories of conflict and compromise over newly diagnosed effects of intensive farming on county nature and archaeology. Wade Martins includes a detailed discussion of the key 1980s battle over the prospective deep drainage of the Halvergate Marshes, which produced the compromise of Environmentally Sensitive Area schemes.

With the exception of some discussion of the conservation of the built environment in urban centres such as King’s Lynn and Norwich, this is a predominantly rural story in terms of the objects given conservation value. However it is also an urban story in that the institutions shaping conservation often had a city base, with urban residents as key activists. Norwich is the key centre here, with the city museum playing an important role from its early nineteenth-century incarnations through its establishment as the Castle Museum in the 1890s, still a popular and significant county institution. The museum has served as meeting point, intellectual hub and site of display, notably in the Norfolk Room, where dioramas of county habitats have been shown since the 1930s. Wade Martins might perhaps have developed further the relationship of city and country in shaping the conservation movement, and indeed reflected on how conservation has itself been important in shaping versions of county identity. County identity can be a highly contested field, and conservation bodies, given their county organizational remit, often find themselves engaged in (and indeed have defined themselves through) such contest.

There are a few minor errors of detail, for example Marion Shoard’s The theft of the countryside was published in 1980 rather than 1971, Anthony rather than his son John Buxton gave Horsey Mere to the National Trust (but there are a lot of Buxtons in the Norfolk story), the Green Party won 15 per cent of the vote in 1989 at a European rather than a general election, and John Betjeman, while he did write much in praise of Norfolk churches, could only have written from beyond his grave in 2001. This is however a valuable and beautifully illustrated guide to a significant county conservation movement, and deserves a wide readership within and beyond Norfolk.