A Landscape for Everyone – project

Many initiatives are working to address unequal and unjust access to nature and the countryside – from diversifying engagement work in conservation organisations to movements campaigning to remove any sense that being in nature is a criminal activity through a Right to Roam. At the same time communities in the north of England experiencing multiple pressures such as rising living costs, ongoing effects of the COVID pandemic, the rise in dangerous accommodation provision, instability and physical threats for asylum-seeking communities and uncertainty for farming communities.

The North Pennines National Landscape is committed to contributing to these collective and diverse efforts, in this context we are living right now. Since 2021 we have been on learning journey to better understand how we can participate in bringing about change, through A Landscape for Everyone, a project supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Along the way we, the staff involved, have questioned our values, our language, our assumptions, and the stories we tell about ourselves and about our landscape. We’ve recognised the importance of building relationships of trust – as outcomes in their own right. We are more aware of the need to both speak up for others and the need to make space for others to speak for themselves. We continue to learn about our own diversity of experience and thought. We are learning to both value and bring knowledge and experience from outside our team into our everyday work.

We have drafted a series of principles which we will reflect on and follow, and a series of actions which we are already implementing.

To make all this work possible we set up an action research group – a community of co-researchers made up of National Landscape staff and individuals from inside and outside the North Pennines National Landscape.

You can read more about why we did this and what we learnt, in two reports:
Beyond the Familiar – Final report of the NLHF funded project

Looking Back, Dreaming Forward – Report from the Action Research Group.
The co-researchers recorded an audio version of this report that you can listen to here.