Marion Shoard (born 6 April 1949) is a British writer and campaigner. She is best known for her work concerning access to the countryside and land use conflicts. In 2002 she became the first person to give a name to the "edgelands" between town and country. Since 2004 she has also written and campaigned about older people's issues.
Life and career
Shord was born in Redruth, Cornwall but spent most of her childhood in Ramsgate, Kent. She was educated at Clarendon House Grammar School in Ramsgate, Kent and St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read zoology, before studying town and country planning at Kingston-upon-Thames Polytechnic (now Kingston University).
She worked for four years at the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) before writing her first book, The Theft of the Countryside (1980). The book triggered debate over the conflict between modern industrial agriculture and the conservation of the UK's countryside. In 1987 Shoard published This Land is Our Land, which examined the history of the relationship between landowners and the landless and proposed it be altered. The same year Shoard presented a documentary on the same subject, Power in the Land.
Shoard continued campaigning, teaching planning at the University of Reading, University College London and Anglia Ruskin University and writing articles for newspapers and magazines. An updated edition of This Land is Our Land was published in 1997.
In 1999 Shoard published A Right to Roam, which explored how a general right of access to the UK's countryside might work. In 2002, her essay on edgelands was the first to name and set forward the characteristics of an emerging landscape on the urban fringe.
After Shoard's mother fell ill in the 1990s, she wrote a guidebook, A Survival Guide to Later Life, offering advice to older people and their carers. A new book, How to Handle Later Life, was published on 1 September 2017.
Published books
The Theft of the Countryside
Shoard's first book was an attempt to explain how farming was transforming the countryside by chronicling the loss of landscape features and wildlife diversity. It explores the impact of subsidies on such change and food over-production. Shoard proposes a variety of planning control extensions, the designation of new national parks and measures to repair damaged landscapes.
The Theft of the Countryside led to renewed focus on whether steps should be taken to protect the countryside against industrial agriculture.
This Land is Our Land
First published in 1987, followed by an updated edition in 1997 with a foreword by George Monbiot, Shoard's second book focuses on land ownership and the legacy of much of the UK's land having been in the possession of a relatively small number of people for a long period of time. It attempts to analyse the scope of landowners' power over the social structure of the countryside and beyond, contrasting the situation with that abroad. Shoard proposes a general right of access and a form of green land taxation in Britain.
The book, which was made into a Channel 4 documentary, is regarded a key text on the subject.
A Right to Roam
Published in 1999, Shoard's third book explores the history of access to the countryside in the UK and abroad. It discusses the possible impact and drawbacks of the partial right later enacted in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 passed by the Labour government under Tony Blair. A Right to Roam was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and won the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild's book of the year award. Nine years later Shoard also won that body's lifetime achievement award.
A Survival Guide to Later Life
In 2004, Shoard wrote a guidebook for older people and their relatives. It was prompted by Shoard's experience struggling to find independent and indepth advice after her own mother fell ill.