Octavia Hill

The social reformer who protected our green spaces.

‘The need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise, and … the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs, common to all.’ Hill said those words more than 130 years ago, an early advocate for the importance of wild spaces. She spent her life working against urban poverty – developing social housing and campaigning for access to green places.

She helped save Hampstead Heath, the lungs of London, from bulldozing by the expanding metropolis in the 1870s, alongside Robert Hunter of the Commons Preservation Society. In the 1880s they campaigned with Hardwicke Rawnsley against slate railways in the Cumbrian valleys of Newlands and Ennerdale. And in 1895 the trio cofounded the National Trust for Places of

Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.

The charity’s first property was five acres of clifftop above Barmouth in Snowdonia called Dinas Oleu; its first building was Alfriston Clergy House in the South Downs; its first nature reserve was two acres of Wicken Fen in Cambridge, not far from the house where Hill was born in Wisbech (see octaviahill.org). The charity now owns nearly 1000 square miles of countryside and 780 miles of coastline.

In the 1880s Hill moved from London to Crockham Hill in Kent, now part of the capital’s Green Belt – a phrase she coined. You can walk a trail in her footsteps, and visit her grave in the village churchyard, and maybe bring secateurs: she used to hand a pair to guests to cut back brambles on the local rights of way. See nationaltrust.org.uk

WALK HERE: Find a Crockham Hill walk at walk1000miles.co.uk/bonusroutes