National parks ‘not just for the cagoule-wearers’
Nature is not the preserve of the middle classes, says Caroline Quentin as she aims to get young outdoors
NATIONAL parks have become the preserve of the “cagoule-wearing middle classes”, the actress Caroline Quentin has complained.
She began a campaign yesterday to draw in more teenagers and ensure the protected landscapes are not “preserved in aspic”.
The documentary presenter and comedian who found fame with the Nineties sitcom Men Behaving Badly, has been appointed president of the Campaign for National Parks.
She said young people should be able to feel that they can clamber all over the areas and not view them as “some sort of historic monument they are not allowed to touch”.
England has 10 national parks covering nearly 5,000 square miles. There are three in Wales and two in Scotland. Each has its own authority with two statutory duties: to conserve the countryside and wildlife, and to allow people to enjoy them.
Quentin said the parks were wrongly seen by the young as a “middle-class, middle-aged preserve”, when they could help teenagers to spend less time on computers. She said she wanted to raise awareness about the parks.
She said: “It is about accessibility. I am a woman in my mid-fifties and so I absolutely identity with the sort of cagoule-clad walker – I am one of those people. I love that aspect of the parks.
“But I want young people to realise that they are theirs – that they are there for rock climbing and kayaking, for learning about nature by getting out among it and not treating it as if it were some sort of historic monument that we are not allowed to touch, that we have to walk through with a big stick and a rucksack on our backs and a pipe in our mouths.”
She will spend a three-year term as president of the campaign, which was set up by organisations including the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It has pushed for 80 years for funding and protection for national parks.
She added: “I want people like me – the cagoule-clad old biddies like me – to continue to enjoy the parks in whatever way they want but we have to find new ways as well of engaging young people who for a lot of their lives are tethered to screens.
“If we don’t take care of it and make it really relevant and part of our everyday conversations and something that as a nation we hold to our bosom and treat with real pride and a sense of fun – unless we get behind that who knows what creeping behaviour will happen and they will disappear. We know that things go.”