The cultural politics of recreational access in North West Europe

Paul Gilchrist
Research and Graduate College of Sport, Chelsea School, University of Brighton

My paper presented some preliminary historical and comparative research into European traditions of recreational access. Activities that take place in nature such as walking, rambling, angling, and canoeing, account for a large proportion of reported physical activity across Europe. Their emergence, persistence and enduring popularity have been shaped by national traditions of an outdoor life (e.g. friluftsliv in Norway; wandervogel in Germany) and the realpolitik of the modern nation-state as the qualities of outdoor living were promoted to produce a healthy populace fit to serve in the defence of the nation. In the post-war period the military requirements of the state may have subsided but the popularity of an outdoor life, including its recreational and sporting elements, remains unabated. Tracing a long cycle in the relationship between sport and the environment, the historian Henning Eichberg has argued that we should be aware of the emergence and impact of ‘green waves’ washing over European physical activity. The post-war ‘green wave’ (or ‘third wave’, Eichberg) has washed ashore a concern for environmentally sustainable forms of physical culture (marking the impact of environmental politics into sports cultures) as well as increased (and commercialised) opportunities for a taste of the extreme in nature (e.g. coasteering, heli-skiing, kitesurfing).

It is within this broad context that access to the countryside was discussed, for the philosophy and politics surrounding sport and the environment has shaped legal customs and traditions that exist today. The concept of walking freely over private land is well known in Europe. Sweden has the allemannsratt (everyman’s right), Germany has Betretungsrecht, Norway has allemannsretten and Finland has Jokamiehen Oikeus. These are culturally-specific and legally differentiated customs of access to the countryside. The situation in England and Wales is somewhat different. The ‘right to roam’ has been a battle ground over the past 200 years between those in possession of land and the landless. The campaign for extended access to open country has had a long and torturous history. The most recent episode, however, marks (on the surface) something of a change of approach. The New Labour Government passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CROW) in 2000, which seemingly saw the elitist superstructure of rural exclusivity being torn down in favour of a legal ‘right to roam’ on the uplands, moors, commons and downs of England and Wales, with no compensation to the landowner. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 swept in more fundamental and wide-ranging changes in Scotland. With the passing of these pieces of legislation, it seemed very much that the ‘forbidden fruit’ of access to the countryside in the UK was being replaced by a new ‘post-capitalist’ equality of access to, and use of, the countryside. Prominent supporters within the rambling community announced that this took the situation in the UK closer toward a model of universal and free rights of access enjoyed in North West Europe, particularly in Scandinavia.

Yet research suggests that the defining cultural politics of recreational access is not incremental and is not proceeding simply toward a model of universal rights of access enjoyed in Scandinavia. Rather, there are important local, regional and national differences to countenance which are related to topographically determined opportunities for sport and recreation. Furthermore, a more critical interpretation can be posed which recognises the enduring power of elites in determining a cultural economy of sport. The legislative history surrounding recreational access in England and Wales, it was argued, has continued to enshrine the role of the landowner as steward of the countryside. This role maintains a surveillance and disciplinary function which serves to exclude others deemed ‘deviant’, ‘transgressive’ or out of tune with the workings of rural life. However, the post-war cultural politics of access in the UK should not be characterised as one between an all-powerful landowner and a powerless and landless mass of recreationists. Educated, liberal and urbane groups such as the Ramblers have been complicit in this arrangement, utilising their cultural capital to enter the countryside and into an idealised notion of rural activity. It is a position that has marginalised other recreationists from using the countryside (mountain bikers, 4x4 motorists, rally-cross, mountaineers) and indicates, in contrast to the rights-based and inclusive culture of outdoors life enjoyed in Scandinavia, that issues of privacy and property, class and capital, exclusion and justice, continue to define the experience of countryside sport and recreation in the UK.

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