The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 is an Act of the

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

which created the National Parks Commission which later became the Countryside Commission and then the Countryside Agency, which became Natural England when it merged with English Nature in 2006. The Act provided the framework for the creation of

National Park A national park is a nature park, natural park in use for conservation (ethic), conservation purposes, created and protected by national governments. Often it is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state dec ...

s and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

and

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...

, and also addressed

public rights of way Right of way is the legal right, established by grant from a landowner or long usage (i.e. by prescription), to pass along a specific route through property belonging to another. A similar ''right of access'' also exists on land held by a gov ...

and access to open land. The Act was passed in 1949 with all-party support, as part of the reconstruction of the UK by the

Labour Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the labour ...

government after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. The Act followed reports by: *a

Government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...

committee chaired by

Christopher Addison Christopher Addison, 1st Viscount Addison, (19 June 1869 – 11 December 1951), was a British medical doctor and politician. A member of the Liberal and Labour parties, he served as Minister of Munitions during the First World War and was late ...

(later Viscount Addison) in 1931, * John Dower, secretary of the Standing Committee on National Parks, to the Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1945, and *a Government committee chaired by Sir Arthur Hobhouse in 1947, which proposed 12 national parks. The first 10 British national parks were designated as such in the 1950s under the Act in mostly poor-quality

agricultural Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating Plant, plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of Sedentism, sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of Domestication, domesticated species created food ...

upland Upland or Uplands may refer to: Geography *Hill, an area of higher land, generally *Highland, an area of higher land divided into low and high points *Upland and lowland, conditional descriptions of a plain based on elevation above sea level *I ...

. An eleventh 'national park' in the

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...

and

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

Broads was set up by a special

Act of Parliament Acts of Parliament, sometimes referred to as primary legislation, are texts of law passed by the Legislature, legislative body of a jurisdiction (often a parliament or council). In most countries with a parliamentary system of government, acts of ...

, the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act, in 1988. Strictly speaking, this is not a national park, but the differences are sufficiently small that this entity is always regarded as being "equivalent to" a national park. The New Forest was designated a national park on 1 March 2005. The

South Downs The South Downs are a range of chalk hills that extends for about across the south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen valley of Hampshire in the west to Beachy Head, in the Eastbourne Downland Estate, East Sussex, in the east. ...

, the last of the 12 areas chosen in the 1947 Hobhouse Report, was designated as South Downs National Park by the Secretary of State

Hilary Benn Hilary James Wedgwood Benn (born 26 November 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Leeds Central since a by-election in 1999. He served in the Cabinet from 2003 to 2010, under both Tony Bla ...

in March 2009. The structure set up by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 was amended by: *the Environmental Protection Act 1990, which created the Nature Conservancy Council (which later became Natural England and transferred functions of the Countryside Commission in

to the Countryside Council for Wales) *the

Environment Act 1995 The Environment Act 1995c 25 passed under the ministerial tutelage of John Gummer, is a United Kingdom Act of Parliament which created a number of new agencies and set new standards for environmental management. See also *English land law *UK en ...

, under which each national park is now operated by its own National Park Authority *the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, under which AONBs are now designated Further amendments are made by the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, under which English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the

Rural Development Service The Rural Development Service (RDS) was formerly part of the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). It ceased to exist on 1 October 2006 following the creation of Natural England. History The RDS was create ...

merged on 1 October 2006 to form new bodies called Natural England and the Commission for Rural Communities.

External links

* {{UK legislation National parks of England and Wales United Kingdom Acts of Parliament 1949